


The Last Time I Saw You

by scioscribe



Category: True Detective
Genre: Alternate Universe, Drug Use, M/M, Undercover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-28
Updated: 2014-10-12
Packaged: 2018-02-10 19:19:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 36,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2036904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>By the time Rust met Marty, he hadn’t said his own name in ten months.</p><p>Longer than that since anyone had called him Rust.  Morales, always precise, called him Cohle, or sometimes Officer Cohle, like Rust needed a reminder of which side of the line he was on: Rust had appreciated that.  To everyone since Morales he had only been Crash.</p><p>Only two people had ever called him Rust.  He didn’t like how easily Marty slipped into the number three spot, like it was waiting for him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [The Last Time I Saw You](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2263956) by [Virgil (alucard1771)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alucard1771/pseuds/Virgil)



> Many thanks to Allie (karategirl448), Hannah (blackeyedblonde/definitionsfading), and Thornfield Girl for help and guidance.
> 
> We're in for a long haul here--several Marty POV chapters compose Part One, and then we have many Rust POV chapters for Parts Two and Three, and then back to Marty for Part Four.
> 
> Violence, sex, offensive language of all stripes, and drug use.

**PART ONE**

Marty inherited him: a lean cutting of frayed and sparking wire, slouched and crumpled in on himself like a cigarette pack crushed in one fist, the undercover everybody and nobody wanted. He’d been the side-effect of some horse-trading with Texas a year or so back and the rumor was he would do anything.

“What kind of anything we talking here?” Marty said. “I give him flowers and he blows me?”

“Pretty son-of-a-bitch like you,” Campbell said, “I’m sure he’d do it without the flowers.”

He put his hand on Campbell’s chest and blocked him as they rounded the corner. “I just want to know what I’m getting into here. If this guy’s Pandora’s box—”

“He’s not Pandora’s anything, he’s a junkie burnout. The way it sounds to me is he fucked the dog years back and so now he’s on loan, long-term, to whoever wants him. Simple enough?”

“Sounds like a raw deal for him.”

“Don’t worry,” Campbell said. “After you meet him, you’re gonna think he deserves plenty worse. The guy’s an asshole.”

He stepped around Marty and opened the door to the box. “Marty, meet Crash. Crash, Detective Hart.”

Crash looked about how Marty would have expected somebody named Crash to look. Scorpion jacket. Sharp-faced, like somebody’d been using his profile to cut lines of cocaine. And he had those junkie eyes, half float and half need. Aside from that he mostly looked like the end of some made-for-TV movie about a James Dean-kind-of Hollywood star, after the drugs had run their course and left the matinee idol bit a little ravaged, which was to say he was either good-looking or had been before and Marty couldn’t quite tell which.

“Charmed, motherfucker,” Crash said.

“Yeah, charmed,” Marty said.

“There you go,” Campbell said. “Getting along like a house afire already. I’ll let you two talk.”

After the door closed, Marty sat down, laced his fingers together, put his elbows on the table, and studied Crash. He said, “That can’t be your actual name.”

“You’d be surprised what people will name their kids.”

“I can’t talk to you like a man and call you Crash.”

“Seems like more your problem than mine.”

“Somebody around here’s got to know who you are,” Marty said, “and I’ll ask around, I’m persistent like that, so you might as well tell me.”

Crash eyed him a little, then pulled out a pack of cigarettes, held them out.

Marty shrugged. “Fine by me.”

“Obliged,” Crash said, and lit up. He drew in a lungful of smoke and then relaxed, slowly, letting it out. “Rustin Cohle.”

“Your parents named you Rustin Cohle?”

“I already said you can’t figure on what people will name their kids,” Crash said. “But you asked.”

“You prefer Rustin or Cohle?”

“I can’t think of one reason why it’d matter.”

“Rust,” Marty decided.

Rust smoked like if he could suck each breath into himself hard enough, it would be as good as a knockout punch. Marty didn’t like him and didn’t see how anybody could like him, but there was nothing about handling an undercover, even part-time, that said they had to braid each other’s hair. A little basic civility was all that was asked for. When Campbell came back in to retrieve him—some waterlogged Labrador retriever fetching a stick he wasn’t sure he had any use for—Marty shook Rust’s hand. Rust gripped him funny, like he wasn’t used to it.

*

He didn’t see Rust again for a month. The next time Campbell pulled him in, he had a bruise on his left cheekbone the size of a saucer. His eyes met Marty’s across the table and he said, “Somebody’s eyes wandered. The idea was to give them something more specific to wander to.” There was a cut at the top of his eyebrow.

“It’s not gonna work,” Marty said. “Women like scars.”

“He also said he’d castrate me and cut her tits off,” Rust said. “And as far as I’m aware of they don’t like either one of those.”

Campbell tossed his pen down on the table. “Fuck me, Crash, tell me you didn’t make me drive an hour and a half to pick your ass up just because somebody threatened to get a pair of shears out of the shed.”

“The woman needs a place to go.”

“Yeah, well, we’re not witness protection. If she’s smart, she’ll get out on her own.” Campbell snapped his notebook closed. “Don’t bother me with this shit again. And don’t come in high.” He rolled his eyes at Marty on his way out but his hand was clenched hard around the spiral edge of the notebook.

Marty stayed. He didn’t have anything else to do. “I’m guessing if she were smart, she wouldn’t be screwing Mr. Chivalry to begin with. Right?”

“Never spoke to her. But there’s all kinds of reasons to make bad choices. Your friend,” Rust said the word with a tight-lipped sneer, “made one.”

“He didn’t like making it.” Marty had _seen_ that wire spiral go into Campbell's hand: he'd pressed it so hard the flesh had turned white. “You gotta know sometimes people have to make hard choices. Going into some shithole on your say-so about some woman with a violent taste in honey. You know half the time no one even presses charges. And then there’s more heat on you. More to the point, since I don’t think he likes you much, more heat on her after we leave her alone again. And the next time he’ll kill her.”

“You think you know the world,” Rust said. “The world’s burnt paper.”

“Why the fuck didn’t I listen when he said you were high?” Marty reached forward to get a look at Rust’s eyes but Rust leaned back reflexively, like Marty had been about to hit him. He pulled back and wiped his hands on his pants leg like Rust’s reaction was something slimy he’d touched without meaning to. “What are you going to do?”

Rust seemed to have a real interest in him then, but not like he would in a person, just like Marty was a tiger at the zoo who had unexpectedly come close to the bars. Or the other way around. “What do you think I’m going to do?”

Marty felt the lens of the box-camera on the back of his neck. He didn’t want to say, not on the record, if anyone happened to check, what he thought Rust was going to do.

“What’s right,” he said. There was always plenty of ambiguity in that. Enough, anyway, so that it contained what he meant.

“And if I do what’s right,” Rust said, carrying the word right like it was so hot it would burn him, “what are you going to do about it?”

Marty had seen plenty of dead men in his career. Not as many dead women. Which wasn’t to say that if the tombstones were pink and blue like baby clothes there wouldn’t have been just as much blush as blue to the homicide roster every year, but he didn’t see them: when a woman died, whoever took the call was usually lower on the totem pole. He thanked God that he hadn’t made the mistake of telling Maggie that, back when they were still together. Even then he hadn’t been so stupid: to tell his wife with her small hands and graceful neck that rookies drew the deaths of people like her because the suspect was usually plain as day. Because there were domestic records on him a mile long. Because she’d had a restraining order that wasn’t worth wiping her ass with in the end.

Because some asshole had threatened to cut off her breasts.

Because when that happened, and there was a body with two bloody craters in it, and the smell of meat in the air like to make you vomit, you didn’t need a head detective. Davey Dumbass would do the job.

“Where’s she going to be?”

“Biker bar off the interstate. Open Road.”

“Kind of a pussy name for that kind of thing,” Marty said, like he’d never heard of it before. He’d driven by it back when Campbell had first introduced them, because he figured with a scorpion jacket on his back, the smell of motor oil on his hands, and the _fuck-you_ expression on his face, there’d be few enough places nearby where Rust would be welcome. “I’ll take care of it.”

Rust looked at him. “Long brown hair,” he said. “A little curl to it. Answers to Dora.”

“If I bust the place, stir some shit up, give her a way out, she gonna take it?”

“She was going to take me when she thought I was a way out,” Rust said. “Anyway, you’ve got that look to you. Square-jawed Captain America.”


	2. Chapter 2

Marty busted Open Road three nights later and found Rust half-hung over the bar and drinking whiskey side-by-side with a big guy, scalp clean and shiny, red beard down his chest like a carpet. Every so often, the guy would put his hand low on Rust’s back and dig his knuckles into his spine like if he did it the right way, Rust would arch up like a cat for petting. Marty steered clear of them and sat in the corner drinking Millers and peeling the labels off, trying to pick Miss Dora Shitboyfriend out of the crowd.

Then all of a sudden he had a lapful of Rust and some bitter-smelling drink, Rust sloped against him, a bridge falling down, his breath liquor-and-water in Marty’s face. It felt like the opening of some movie. Give him a blander face and Rust a decent rack and a paisley skirt and they’d have been in love in twenty minutes and split up in fifty.

Rust put his mouth next to Marty’s ear. “Outside, ten minutes.” Then, much louder, “Fuck off, Eagle Scout.”

A couple people raised up out of their seats. Rust had a crazed half-smile on his face: staring him down was like going eye-to-eye with a werewolf, as long as he was thinking of movies. Some peroxide blonde said, “You get him, Crash,” in a giggly stoner voice.

“Catch you later,” Marty said. Voice like something he’d chiseled out of rock—let ‘em all hear the pissy law-enforcement disappointment there and whatever came later would be no surprise. He headed out to his car and sat on the hood—there not being anyone else outside, he couldn’t see the harm in it—and wished he hadn’t quit smoking because he couldn’t think of anything to do with his hands. He wondered if he’d be back in another month to bail out the blonde who looked like she wanted to chew Rust up as her own personal licorice whip.

Rust did make it out in ten minutes almost on the dot, like he’d seduced the girl with her tits in one hand and a stopwatch in the other. He got her back into the brush that ran up the asshole of the bar and was all over her. Roman hands and Russian fingers, Marty’s old man had said about men who got that handsy in public: put an ocean between Joe Blow down the street and certain proclivities. He watched, the car hood an uncomfortable bleacher seat to this awkward show, feeling like some sweaty-palmed pervert, limp-dicked, most likely—but there it was, Rust’s hand and a fold of white dipping into Dora’s back jeans pocket.

Marty counted to thirty, slow, and then came across the dark asphalt field, shone a keychain flashlight in their faces, and frisked them. Rust first. He thrust his ass back against Marty’s hand and laughed hoarsely, like a bird cawing. Marty pushed him forward and he kept step, feet graceful even in the underbrush. Then Dora, and of course he turned it up, the sheet of candy-dot acid in bright rainbow colors.

He gave Rust a look and Rust’s expression only opened up more. His face a door to some broken-down house. “You just gonna watch there, Johnny Law, or are you gonna take your pants down and participate? We’ll let you have some.”

“Shut the fuck up, sunshine,” Marty said. Rust was still close enough that he reached out and hooked his thumb through Rust’s back belt-loop in some attempt to signal him, though he wasn’t clear on what he was trying to say. He let go fast, hand hot, and turned to Dora. “Sweetheart,” he said. Like he was sorry for it.

*

Her full name was Dora Lange, despite the first ten minutes of the drive where she tried to convince him it was Doraleigh, just one word, like Cher.

“Those aren’t even mine,” she said. She wiped a hand across her eyes and he saw the glitter-polish on her fingernails. “I should have known better.” Every word hollowed out like she’d taken a melon-baller to it. His mind had been on kitchen equipment a lot since Maggie had left, like he had to itemize what was missing from his drawers and figure out if he needed it. Anyway, it was a distraction.

“Look,” he said, “you’re not even who I was after, but I couldn’t just stand there and let that asshole smile at me.”

She met his eyes in the rearview mirror. “I let them smile at me all the time.”

He drove around in the widest circles he could manage. By the time he’d passed the refineries the second time, they had been through it all. _Him: I could take you back. Her: If you take me back, they’ll think I talked. Him: Say you didn’t_ —acting dumb as mud, like he’d never known men like the one Rust was pretending to be. She didn’t even dignify it with a response, just: _They’ll kill me. Him: So it’s jail. Unless_ —and then he started letting her realize he was circling, drawing the diameters smaller and smaller, until they were just in one spot, and he had her thinking—he hoped, for Rust’s sake—that she had talked him around. That he had fallen for big brown eyes and comparative innocence.

In the end, he drove her to a bus station and gave her two hundred dollars.

She didn’t ask him why he was carrying so much cash. Like she had no conception of what was normal.

The skin on his thumb in the pale dome-light still seemed whited-out from the pressure of Rust’s belt loop. He rubbed at it distractedly all the way home, got in after two, and slept on the sofa, where some of the fussy throw pillows still smelled like Maggie’s perfume.

*

Then he saw Rust two weeks later and Rust was even more black-and-blue. Marty pegged the shape of the fists for whatever asshole had laid claim to Dora, unless Rust had taken the beating just for agitating the cop and drawing attention. He could put a timeline on it—the bruises were yellowed enough to not be fresh.

“Shit, Crash,” Campbell said, “are you planning on getting them all on assault and battery?” He had an ink blot his note-taking hand and he sucked at it until his lips were touched with blue. Marty wanted to tell Rust that he’d worked two desks down from Campbell for five years and the guy only started tonguing ballpoints or his own fingers when he was distracted beyond measure, but it didn’t seem so much like Rust couldn’t translate Campbell’s anxiety into something connected to him as that he just didn’t care about it. Campbell didn’t like him, anyway, that much was true. Marty couldn’t defend him on that score.

“Something about my face just seems to make people want to mess it up,” Rust said.

“You’re too pretty,” Marty said. He leaned against the table. “I’d never have pegged you for working incognito anyway, the way you don’t look like anybody else.”

Rust brushed the back of his fingers against a bruise on his cheekbone, hands close together like he lived his life in cuffs and had gotten used to it. “If you spend enough time looking at people, you’d realize they’re nothing but delusions and vanities knit together by a little bone. The thing about the bottom of the world is they understand that there. When you’ve got blood on your knuckles, gunpowder on your palms, someone’s spit on your face, everybody looks pretty much the same. And you pare down to essentials. What’s the one delusion you can’t live without? --For most men, it’s power.”

“Yeah,” Marty said, “I’m all the time looking at people thinking about the delusions holding them together.”

Campbell rolled his eyes hard. “He’s always got a line of bullshit like that. I’m guessing it sounds better when you’re stoned all the time.”

“Probably,” Rust admitted.

“And Narcotics is through with your shit for the day,” Campbell said, slapping his notebook closed. “You’re Homicide’s problem for however long they want you.” He tapped Marty on the shoulder. “Grab me when you’re done with him and I’ll get him a ride back to greaser-junkie paradise.”

Rust lit up a cigarette the second he was gone. “Well, Detective Hart?”

“Marty’s good,” Marty said, for what had to be the second or third time. “I’m not working anything drug-related right now. Far as I know, nobody else is, either.”

“You’re head detective.”

“First year.”

“Somebody thought you were good.”

“Decent enough. More likable than you.”

“That’s too easy,” Rust said. He didn’t necessarily seem eager for Marty to leave, as if he thought they could pass the afternoon like that, with him smoking and Marty breathing in the leftovers, making broken-backed conversation. With no change in his voice, he added, “Where’d you end up taking her?”

“Bus station.”

“Money?”

“Two hundred.”

Rust nodded and reached for his wallet. Marty held up a hand.

“You don’t pay half a share of anything with drug money. Besides.” He gestured towards the most obvious bruise, the one still plum-dark at its core. “Looks like you already did your share. And I can’t give you the acid back—too risky to hold onto for long. Flushed it at a Circle K.”

“Then you owe me money,” Rust said.

“You settle for a Pepsi?”

Rust looked at him. Took two more drags off the cigarette and then ground it out abruptly, flattening it down to limp paper and ash. “Yeah.”

So Marty went and got his out of the break-room fridge. He passed Campbell on his way back and Campbell shook his head at him, as much of a scold as a grade school teacher. “He’s a resource, Marty, not a collie you picked up off the side of the road. You don’t have to scratch him behind the ears every time he’s in.”

“Annoying you’s a bonus,” Marty said, bland as cotton, and Campbell said, “Asshole,” affectionately.

He brought the Pepsi in to Rust and handed it over. There were a second his fingers grazed Rust’s, their hands warm against the cold and sweating aluminum. Rust drank it fixedly and crushed it when it was done, flipped it over and inspected the inked-on MH on the bottom. He couldn’t seem to stop shaking. The cold, Marty reckoned, or else the sugar.


	3. Chapter 3

Rust said he needed cocaine and Quaaludes too, if Marty had any, like the evidence locker was a 7-Eleven and he could afford to browse, do some comparison shopping.

That day he had a caged-animal look, all still mouth and restless eyes, and he was chain-smoking even more than usual like he had to keep his hands busy. At least he wasn’t bashed-up this time around. Marty had gotten tired of all the bruises.

He’d brought Rust a burger. No special reason, he’d just started doubling up his lunch order whenever he knew Rust would be hauled in, just because it at least gave him about two-and—a-half minutes of guaranteed conversation—“Got you onion rings, too, but they always end up half fries, so whatever you like, I’ve got about half a cup’s worth”—and because it shaved that haunted look off Rust for about the same amount of time. Rust always ate like he’d almost forgotten how to do it: picked all the sesame seeds off his bun and then ate them off the wrapper. Put salt on things that didn’t need salt.

“How’s your burger?” Marty asked, to buy himself some time.

Rust dead-eyed him. “I’ve got to have it. I need a reason for the disappearing acts and it helps if I vary it a little. Or get them stoned so fast after I come back that they don’t worry about it one way or the other.”

“Why don’t you ask Campbell?”

“If I ask Campbell, I have to sign and account for it. And it has to come up again, preferably all of it, in the course of some investigation. He won’t be into it. He’s not working anything so hot right now he wants to complicate it.” He pressed another sesame seed against his thumbnail and ate it. “You saw who I’m working with.”

Marty sighed. “Not too much from any one box, nothing too new, and nothing with my fucking name on it, would you please?”

Once they were inside, he thought it was a good thing he hadn’t laid down a rule about them needing to hurry, because Rust walked through the evidence locker like he was on a stroll, like he should have been carrying a parasol, like he was in _Mary Poppins_.

“I didn’t spend this much time picking out an engagement ring.”

Rust glanced at Marty’s left hand.

“Yeah,” Marty said. “Point taken. About six months ago, if you were wondering.”

“I wasn’t.” He kept on the shelves and the plastic, red-sticker-sealed evidence bags like he was reading tea leaves. “The air smells different in here.”

“Different than where?”

“I was thinking the box.”

Marty nodded. “Probably cleaner. Nobody’s too worried about suspects getting a lungful of asbestos or whatever the fuck’s in the walls in this place, but contamination’s a problem in here, so we’ve got more scrubbers, ventilation. Even one of those fancy air freshener’s plugs into the socket. But it’s not so bad in the bullpen, either.”

“I’ve never been out there except on a walk-through. Haven’t been anywhere in a police station except the box in years.”

He pressed his thumb against a flipped-over bag. Prints on plastic. Like if they’d had holy water he would have daubed in it and then crossed himself: reverent like that.

Marty couldn’t take his eyes off him. “If you come in again—when you come in again, I mean—if you ask for me, I can take you out here, or clear a space somewhere.”

Rust didn’t say anything. He found a prescription pill bottle in one box and a duct-taped bag of coke in another three rows down. He spent a lot of time looking at the boxes of Marty’s for someone who didn’t care enough to have a fucking conversation.

*

Marty kept up with the food every time Rust came in. He didn’t know why. Maybe Campbell was right and he really did think Rust was a half-starved stray keening out for a pat and a treat or two. But after a while, it got too arduous to think of fast food orders and did Rust like mayonnaise when he only ate it about half the time, so he started bringing leftovers of whatever he’d done the night before. The easiest thing was spaghetti, because it warmed up easy in its little Tupperware snap-lid container, and he could serve it up to Rust with steam still coiling down in white blankets from the sides. And he could do spaghetti, kind of. It was one of the things he’d made in college for Maggie.

Ground beef a little scorched, noodles a little what Maggie had called _al dente_ , but pretty good, and if it was good enough for him it was, he decided, good enough for Rust.

And Rust did seem to fixate on it in a weird kind of way.

“There,” Marty said, when Rust skimmed the fork along the sides and picked up the last bit of sauce. “Starting to look a little less like anybody who touched you’d come away bleeding.”

*

Quesada partnered him with Steve Geraci in July when Steve’s partner rode a bad dish of clams straight to early retirement.

“I’ve gotten kind of used to being on my own,” Marty said.

“Well, you shouldn’t be on your own. Encourages your natural tendency to piss all over people. And narcotics wants you to leave their undercover alone.”

“Narcotics can blow me.”

“That collegial, hail-fellow-well-met attitude,” Quesada said, “is why you need a partner. Looking at you side-by-side with somebody else, you look like less of an asshole, and I remember why I promoted you. On your own, I start to forget. So you’re getting Steve. The undercover I frankly don’t give a shit about as long as he’s helpful, but just remember it’s our collective dick in their throats, not just yours, hotshot.”

“Collective dick,” Marty said.

“Not to mention three months ago you were in here all hang-dog wanting to see if anybody was free. _I keep havin’ to listen to the radio_ , you said. And some story about you and Maggie I listened to because you were still in the grace period a man gets after his first divorce.”

He knew what story he’d told because he’d been thinking of it just then. He’d graduated a year before her and they’d done the long distance thing for a while before it had trailed off. Reconnected again when she moved to Baton Rouge and then he’d thrown himself at her like she was a bed and he hadn’t slept in days—shoes on, tie still knotted, that kind of hard love. He’d tried explaining it to her like that once and she’d said he’d better leave writing cards to Hallmark if that was the sentiment he could come up with and she hadn’t looked at him exactly the same way since. But it was true. He couldn’t explain what a relief it was to have her with him. She’d seemed like the answer to every question.

But even feeling that way, the long distance had about killed him. Not just going without. Maggie had been inventive about phone-sex and he’d had a good right hand and a staunch belief in his own goodness, back then. But the drive. They’d traded weekends back and forth about who drove where and when he went to see her, he had to do it with mix-tapes and a package of Oreos and a couple of gas station stops along the way, he got that lonely and bored on his own.

She’d never minded.

“But there’s nothing to think about!”

“Sure,” she’d said. “Just alone with your thoughts, you and the road. I like that.”

“I don’t have thoughts, except about you,” he’d said. “And that hardly makes it better.”

But lately he didn’t feel like he was on his own, even though he was, more than ever: alone at work and alone at home, too, at least every other weekend. Sometimes, if he called ahead—and could talk himself into calling ahead and not gritting his teeth all through it so she could tell—he could get Maggie to invite him over for dinner on a weeknight and he could see the girls then, too, and have a little grown-up time with Maggie. Civilized divorce talk about the weather and the girls’ school. Some patient she had.

But there was still an awful lot of time to be lonely. If he were gonna be lonely.

But apparently he wasn’t going to be.

Still, he had Steve, which meant he had to introduce Steve to Rust, on the same principle Campbell had introduced him in the first place: if you’ve got a resource, don’t be a dick about it. Sharing is caring.

It didn’t go well.

Steve had no patience with him and Marty had no way to explain why patience was necessary, if it could be scraped up. Steve asked if “Crash” was short for “crash-and-burn.” Rust didn’t care; just smoked. Steve got frustrated. Some men could only play tennis against the wall for so long before they started wondering where the opponent had gone.

“He’s just like that,” Marty said.

Rust looked up. “You talkin’ to me or to him?”

“I expected you to be courteous to my partner. Like an adult.”

Rust scoffed. “If he’s your partner you could do better.”

“Don’t just _smile_ at him when he says shit like that,” Steve said irritably. “It’s like the two of you are in cahoots.”

Marty hadn’t known he was. Smiling, or in cahoots. But he liked the word.


	4. Chapter 4

“I ought to give him credit,” Rust said a few weeks later.

Marty had taken him to a diner that time. Rust turned out to be a real trial in restaurants, mostly because he treated menus as laminated irrelevancies, didn’t like that he couldn’t smoke, and wouldn’t order because preferences were just humanity’s programming trying to sound off its false uniqueness and anyway diner food always tasted yellow, whatever the hell that meant. Marty picked for him and got him an omelet with as much as they could throw in: steak, ham, bell peppers, tomatoes, scoops of cheese, a side dish of jalapenos looking like lidless green eyes. He got sunny-side up for himself. It wasn’t bad. Rust ate mechanically until Marty offered him a piece of toast soppy with egg yolk and then he took it and actually touched his tongue to his lips afterwards, like, look at that: programming.

“What do the walls taste like?” Marty asked, mostly to be a dick, mostly to cancel out his interest in the way Rust was looking at his last piece of toast.

There were things he had time for—Rust was one of them, just barely—and things he didn’t, and this other thing, this shifting sometimes-awareness of where Rust’s body was in relation to his, was definitely the latter. Not the time. Not the place. And he wasn’t the man for it.

Rust took two more sawed-off bites of omelet, like if he got halfway through, Marty would cave like giving a kid dessert and let him have the rest of that toast. “Nicotine and hot milk.”

That made a peripheral kind of sense to him. “You ought to give who credit?”

They did that a lot, and it worried him as much as the other thing, that they could lob some topic back and forth like a ball of paper, one of them picking it up off the ground and reusing it.

“Geraci. I’ve spent years keeping level, never letting the needle get into red. Deliberate divorce from anything that might resemble a feeling.”

“Yeah,” Marty said. He swapped Rust’s bacon for his toast. “That seems about as healthy as the inside of your head gets.”

“But I can put a definition to hating Geraci.”

Rust never said _your partner._

The shit he noticed these days.

“All the people you see. And you pick _Steve Geraci_ to hate more than anybody else.”

Rust tore a piece out of the toast. “He spreads his shit out all over your desk.” Like that was some cardinal sin.

But when Marty made it back to the bullpen later that evening, he looked and all he could see was a triangular corner of paper, one of Steve’s arduously proofread reports, jutting over maybe half-an-inch into his space, behind the picture frame of Audrey and Maisie. The one Rust never even looked at. (Whenever Marty wanted to get pissed at him, as a distraction, the guy’s complete and deliberate disinterest in his kids worked pretty well.) So what Rust had been thinking of he really couldn’t say.

“Hey,” Steve said. “Drinks later?”

He was always extra-chummy after Marty got back from being with Rust, in a clumsy kind of way that reminded Marty of the time he’d let Maggie go to her parents alone and then when she’d come back he’d been all over her, _can I get your robe, honey, I’ll order a pizza._ Like Steve thought Rust was a punishment Marty was suffering through for both their sakes and he’d gotten off the hook for doing the same and felt guilty about it. Wasn’t the case at all, but Marty liked that marginally better than a grown man throwing a sulk because Rust had razzed him a little.

“I know this place where the waitresses, man, it’s better than Hooters, they wear these little tassels—” He spread his hands. Grinned.

“Sure,” Marty said. “Nothing else to do.”

*

They were clearing the plates off the table—“You have to help,” Maggie said, like he’d lost leeway since the divorce—and Marty was scraping the broad part of his thumbnail against a stuck-on stain of gravy when he said, abruptly, “You think you could teach me how to cook?”

He could only barely make out the shape of Maggie’s hips underneath the apron: it helped when she put her hands on them.

He had to wonder how long it would take before missing her—the perfume she wore at just her wrists and neck, the peeling rubber at the bottom of her tennis shoes, the barbed sugar in her voice when she made pointed comments about people other than him—faded out into the larger absence of just missing what they’d had. Hard seeing the girls in short bursts of time. Hard coming home to an empty house. He’d been thinking more and more lately of how he could fill it up—mostly impractical ways—but sometimes he still rolled over onto his side in the middle of the night, started to ask her something, and realized she wasn’t there. 

_You know I miss you_ , he almost said, but she’d put a stop to _anything you say in that tone of voice, Marty, I mean it, you talk like that and we end up making mistakes_. That was back when they’d been split up a month and they’d, well, reconnected against the dining room table after the girls had gone to bed. Afterwards they hadn’t been married again, Maggie had just buttoned up her skirt matter-of-factly and shown him the door, the muscles in her throat standing out rigidly. She didn’t want what she only sometimes wanted, was the gist of it. And he couldn’t afford to lose family dinners.

Finally, Maggie said, “Okay, yeah. On my schedule, no more than twice a week.”

“You want to know why I want to learn how to cook?”

She raised her eyebrows. “You got tired of TV dinners and burnt pasta? I remember what you used to try to scrounge up for a romantic dinner when we were in college.”

“I only had a hot-plate back then.” Her rejection of the spaghetti felt like a betrayal. He ducked his chin down and concentrated on the spray of water hitting the sink drain. “I’ve gotten better since.”

“From all the cooking you used to do on the couch with a beer?” She shook her head quickly. “It’s not that we didn’t work because you didn’t help out. Even though you should have helped out and you should know that for next time. But it is, thank God, not my place to say it anymore.” She handed him the pot off the stove and he took the sponge to it with greater-than-usual ferocity. “We can be—friendly.”

“Never had a woman as a friend.”

“I’m shocked by that,” Maggie said.

“Friendly seems to mean you busting my balls a lot.”

“Sometimes,” she said, and smiled her wickedest smile, the one that had made him fall in love with her when he had more balls than sense (which he sure wasn’t saying to her now, given what she’d surely say back).

She’d come to him months ago, her eyes wet but her lips firm—he’d never seen so much as quiver from her, whatever they said about women, although she bit the Cupid’s bow of her mouth whenever she came—and she’d said that she loved him but they weren’t good for each other, never had been. This was the first time since then he could put the emphasis on the first part. Shoot ahead to some kind of future where they found the goodness in each other somewhere.

He was glad she didn’t know about Lisa and the month of surreal, _Penthouse Letters_ hook-ups they’d had in her well-lit apartment: handcuffs, first fuzzy and then not, shit from her bedroom drawer he’d never dreamed of. But mostly just the allure of different. For her too—a week after the divorce, she had blown him in the shower on the morning after their first sleepover, let him wash the strawberry shampoo out of her hair, and then said, “I think we’re done here, don’t you, Marty?” _Bitch_ , he’d thought reflexively, almost said, mostly because the light in her eyes hadn’t even changed, but then he’d nodded, because yeah, they were. She was only good as spice. Without Maggie, there was nothing there for him. Now they just avoided each other whenever they had to walk down the same hall.

Maggie didn’t know. That was the one thing he was grateful for.

“Anyway, _buddy_ ,” he said, appreciating the way her smile only widened, “I’ve got another friend I’ve been doing a little cooking for.”

Her smile froze and then she shook it off. “Sorry. It’s just—we haven’t talked about whether or not we’re going to talk to each other about—”

“No, no. It’s not like that.” He thought about the teeth-marks on the toast crust Rust had left on the plate and the way he’d watched it rise up with the plate when the busboy had carried it off. “I don’t know what it’s like, Maggie. Can’t get it straight in my head yet.”

Maggie always had this look on her like she understood him better than he did himself. She might have, too—another reason, he thought when he was in the mood to strip the skin off himself, that they hadn’t really worked. She nodded slowly, like she was jarring some bone that was stuck in her throat, and then she said, “Well, whoever it is. Whatever it is. It’ll be better if you can make something other than microwaved Salisbury steak. It’ll go better for you.” She pressed her sudsy hands against her apron and left faint smudges there.

He could have thrown himself at her—at that moment, she would have let him, because jealousy was an aphrodisiac hard to shake, even Rust had admitted that. (His head a jumbled collection of Rust’s assorted sayings, most of them not really qualifying as out-of-context because they’d had, to him, no context to begin with.) He got a vivid image in his head—Dear Penthouse all over again—of getting down on his knees on the clean linoleum of their old kitchen floor, the one he’d put in by hand when they’d finally had money to strip the old seventies dull orange fake adobe print. Pressing his mouth to the juncture of her thighs straight through her dress. Marty knew his strengths in bed. He’d never been much for self-control, for lasting long when it got to the real event, but he gave good oral, wherever he was giving it. He’d win her over. She’d sag towards him, say _fuck_ in that throaty way he liked. He’d be all dampness and pressure until she opened up like a flower.

She stood looking at him.

And suddenly it switched off. He thought of somebody else. And he saw her thinking of something, too.

She took a hard-bristled brush to the bottom of the skillet and worked furiously there for a minute. Ran warm water over her hands when she was done. She said, “I’ve been considering seeing someone else, too.”

“Oh,” he said. “Good.” Of course he didn’t like it. Couldn’t imagine ever having to sit down at _family dinner night_ with some asshole who, what, taught the girls to play Bocce ball in the yard Marty had always mowed, who knew about Maggie’s teeth against her lip and the way the muscles in her legs were corded strong beneath the silk of her skin.

But he wanted to be kind to her, because he suspected she had just been kinder to him than he could fully realize. “Anybody’d be lucky to have you, Maggie.”

She leaned against him, her shoulder against his. And he did, despite everything, feel lucky to be trusted with the slight weight of her. But it made him want more of a burden. To say, _I can take on more than this_. If not with her, then with someone else. _Someone else_ , he thought vaguely, as though he had no specific candidates in mind.

*

The story Marty liked to tell about the co-ed he picked up. Her roommate.

That was a true story.

He’d changed some of the pronouns, that was all.


	5. Chapter 5

Marty liked to take Rust out whenever he could, but Rust got antsy in restaurants, eye-fucking everyone who walked in the door. It was easier most of the time to warm up his leftovers and eat them in the records room. Rust consulted case files almost without reference to what they were discussing or how cold they’d gone, a man getting drunk on typography and slick-backed Polaroids. He summarized them for Marty as _faintly acidic_ and _the vanilla of this old paper_ , his head tilted back like he could drink it in, nose up at this kind of wine-tasting.

“Yeah,” Marty had said, “and the brassy impertinence of the staples, with just a hint of oak.”

But he kept taking Rust there.

“The smell of paper medicates you,” Marty said. “’Course, then I have to watch you go around sniffing things, which tends to kill off the appetite.”

He’d brought meatloaf and mashed potatoes that day and Rust had eaten in that head-down mechanical-feeder way Marty thought the food didn’t deserve, not when he’d done what Maggie had said and thrown in a handful of crushed crackers along with the ground beef. And the squiggle of ketchup on top: downright artistic. Of course, the potatoes had some peel in it, but you got potatoes in fancy places that looked like that. But Rust’s conversation that day was even shittier than usual. His head somewhere else.

Then he said, “Can you sit in that chair over there for about ten minutes without makin’ a fuss about it?”

There was a sheen of sweat on his forehead. Marty wanted to clamp his hand on it, or even pry at Rust’s eyelids like he’d seen Campbell do a time or two, but Rust didn’t seem to much like being touched, whether he was high or not. And sometimes he was. Marty tried to ignore it. What a man did to keep the strings of his mind knotted up in Rust’s situation was none of his business.

He kept his hands to himself. “You’re not having some kind of episode or anything, are you?”

Rust slid a pen out of his pocket. It was one of those cheap hard-plastic-shell-bodied ones, a gas station pen with a few inches of beaded chain still hanging from it, like Rust had wrenched it off its post. “I like to draw. Crash doesn’t, so I’m out of practice.”

“You’re getting pretty _Three Faces of Eve_ about yourself,” Marty said.

“My head’s a flock of sparrows startled off the ground,” Rust said.

“As long as we cleared that up, I guess it’s okay.” He squinted at Rust. “Do you ever say things like that just to fuck with me?”

“Not as often as you’d probably suppose,” Rust said. The curve of his mouth was promising. “Come on, Detective Hart.”

“You never call me Marty.”

“Come on, Marty,” Rust said softly.

Something like static electricity went across Marty’s forearms. “Yeah, okay.” He went to the chair Rust had meant—one of those weird torture-device chairs with nothing but metal bars for a back—and sat down. Reconsidered: bent forward with his chin on his knuckles like that statue.

Rust shook his head. “I’m not sculpting you. You don’t have to look interesting. And you just look like you’re trying to take a shit when you do that anyway.”

“Everybody’s a critic. So how do you want me to look?”

Rust did that thing with his tongue again where all of a sudden Marty could see it. He shifted in the death-trap chair.

“I don’t know,” Rust said. “Just still.”

Marty stayed still.

Rust drew quickly. He seemed frustrated with the blueness of the pen, the vividness of that squid-ink indigo smeared across the page, because the first take he seemed to spoil by laying line-over-line too thickly in what Marty guessed was an effort to turn blue into black. He shook his head at Marty again in an apology that seemed almost rueful and flipped the page. Vanilla, Marty thought, and wondered which file’s back pages Rust was using. This time he let the blue stand. Marty couldn’t see much of it from the angle he had—everything looked foreshortened, like Rust was gonna do one of those caricatures of him like on a fairground, his face flattened into nothing but scowl and ( _square-jawed Captain America_ ) forehead. So instead he watched Rust’s hands.

Rust had good hands. Strong. Sort of graceful.

A little Nike _swoosh_ of hair fell across Rust’s forehead, advised Marty to _just do it_. He couldn’t. It had been too long. He was head detective of CID. He didn’t need it, didn’t need this, didn’t need Rust. Rust’s hands. His stupid fucking floppy hair.

You pick the person you want to be and Marty had done that, he’d picked, so who was _Rust Cohle_ to come in and fuck him up?

“What’s that look on your face?” Rust said.

“I don’t have a look.”

Rust put his attention on the page again. “Suit yourself.”

“You almost done?”

“Be done a lot faster if you’d keep your face the same and not keep talking.”

“You hang out all day with murderers and nobody’s killed you yet,” Marty said. “Kind of remarkable when you think about it.”

“Mm,” Rust said.

“I like you best like this,” Marty said, with a sort of keening in his voice that he didn’t recognize, or else didn’t want to: mostly associated it with standing outside locked doors. “You know. When we’re alone.”

“There,” Rust said. He lifted the pen up from the paper. “But you got to keep it for me.”

Rust’s face was the most locked-up door he’d ever seen, Marty decided, as he took the paper. Some blurred type on the back—shit, he’d found something so old it had actually been mimeographed, had that gummy purple look to it—and then he flipped it over and let his eyes resolve on what Rust had drawn. He grinned.

“Damn, Rust, you’ve got me looking like I could be a pin-up. I’m going to make copies, send out mailers.”

He immediately knew that it was the wrong thing to say.

Rust said, “Do whatever you want,” tonelessly.

“Rust—”

“I got to head out. People wonder about me when I’m gone this long.”

“It’s a good drawing, Rust, it’s really good, I just—”

Rust’s hand had cracked the casing on the pen. He’d hate that, having those ink splotches on his skin, like he had something in common with Campbell after all. He stood in the doorway, his body half in and half out, and he said, “You fuck me up, Marty. Like I’m wearing someone else’s skin. Maybe it’d be better if you just came around when you had something you wanted me to bite down. I’ll keep my ear to the ground if any bodies drop.”

“Dammit, Rust,” Marty said.

“You’re dangerous,” Rust said bluntly. “I can’t compartmentalize it.”

 _I’m not coming onto you_ , Marty wanted to say. _Not doing anything you have to run away from. I’ll be safe._

But Rust wasn’t safe. Better for both of them, then, if Rust walked away. Marty could start thinking about the future again.

“Yeah,” Marty said. The word was as bitter on his tongue as quinine. “Guess we’ll always have this magical moment you drew a cartoon of me on somebody’s old casework. But you do whatever the fuck you want, Rust.” He wanted some kind of reaction—at the very least, for Rust’s eyes to widen—but whatever he said was just like chipping away at concrete. The way Rust looked, Marty might as well not have been speaking English.

*

He shouldn’t have kept the drawing. Did anyway. He would turn it clockwise and counterclockwise sometimes when he couldn’t sleep, or else cross his eyes at it, like it was one of those Magic Eye puzzles they bought for the girls and the right answer would leap out at him any minute as long as he was patient.

He brought in two containers of yesterday’s ziti the next time Campbell had Rust in. Habit. He ate both of them and puked tomato sauce down the side of his car when he and Steve were out on a call. Steve thought he was hungover, thought that was funny, so that was fine.

Everything was fine.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Morales" as a name for Rust's handler is, as everyone should know at this point (because if you haven't read "Senses," you're missing out), borrowed from teethwax.

**PART TWO**

By the time Rust met Marty, he hadn’t said his own name in ten months.

Longer than that since anyone had called him Rust. Morales, always precise, called him Cohle, or sometimes _Officer Cohle_ , like Rust needed a reminder of which side of the line he was on: Rust had appreciated that. To everyone since Morales he had only been Crash. Or _shithead, motherfucker, asshole, son-of-a-bitch, pretty boy, faggot_.

Only two people had ever called him Rust. He didn’t like how easily Marty slipped into the number three spot, like it was waiting for him.

After he blew it all up, he spent months lying on his back in the clubhouse, staring at the white-and-waterstain canvas of his bedroom ceiling, trying to reshape the drawing on that kind of scale. Blowing smoke across it like an eraser whenever he was done. He never seemed to get anywhere with it.

*

Ginger tapped him that night to be muscle, but inconspicuous, so Rust spent a couple of hours on a barstool. Drinking Jack-and-Cokes he watered down when he could—easy enough to palm an ice cube in if he sat half-hung over the bar and acted like he was swiping lemon wedges and extra pretzels. Crash talked in a slur most of the time anyway. Only Ginger could ever tell if he was sober or not and one time that was only because Ginger stuck his tongue in Crash’s mouth and tasted water instead of whiskey. Crash bloodied his lip for him and then sucked the blood off it. A bad move: Ginger had fallen as close to in love with him as Ginger ever did.

It had lasted close to a month, what had to be a record for Ginger and had been a record for Rust, too, after Claire. Ever since, Ginger’s eyes had roved across him whenever he was in the room, trying to determine whether he should keep Crash around for a free fuck every now and then or kill him. So far he’d leaned towards the former.

The legacy of their relationship—the one Rust knew about, anyhow, since he hadn’t disclosed it to Morales, Campbell, or any of the handlers who’d come in-between and so hadn’t gotten blood-work done even though he’d let, hell, _encouraged_ Ginger to go bareback a time or two—was a quarter-inch scar on Rust’s stomach from being bent over a counter straight into the mouth of a broken bottle and Ginger’s ability to know if he were really drunk or just faking it. He thought the mistake had been letting Ginger give it to him one time too many—men like Ginger crossed the line from gratitude to contempt too easily and so Crash had gone from hearing _fuck, fuck, Crash_ to _you’re such a bitch for this_ in three weeks flat.

Not that he spent a lot of time, exactly, thinking where his thing with Ginger had gone wrong. There hadn’t ever been any right. But it was information it seemed important to have.

Ginger came in late and Crash flicked open a grin at him like a switchblade, for his eyes only. Enough hard white teeth there to tell Ginger, even from a distance, that he was Puritan-sober. A little buzzed from pot was all. His reflexes like snakes uncoiling slowly inside his muscles.

Ginger seemed to accept it. Must have been in a good mood.

He was leading in some slaughterhouse cut-of-meat good old boy, dead behind the eyes, steer-faced, like he’d grown up eating feed out of his own shit. Rust would pity him more if Crash weren’t the same way. American death in a leather jacket.

He and Ginger seemed to be talking business, but in such low tones Rust couldn’t hear what was being said. The temptation was to cling to the tattered vinyl of the barstool and keep the salt of the pretzels and the silver of the ice in his mouth, but since he’d said to Marty that he needed compartmentalization, like he needed to be whole for the job, he’d taken on an obligation to do it. To do something other than live in what was left of his tattered existence. He stood up and swayed, put drunkenness in his feet and sex on his hips, for Ginger, to make up for being where he wasn’t wanted. Claire had said he could have been an actor, back when his undercover had been limited to a day on the streets of Houston drinking from a forty and wearing a coat he could’ve drowned in. _I’m so proud of you, baby._

“Shit,” Crash drawled. “You look like you wrestled a bull or two.”

“Anything with horns,” the feedlot steer said.

“Crash isn’t invited,” Ginger said.

“Bad manners,” Crash said.

Ginger put a hand on his arm—used it to drag him down into the booth, but kept it there, the pressure of his fingers leaving bruises. Rust was used to that. “A few months ago, Crash caused some problems for us made me wonder if he wasn’t too expensive a person to know.”

“Shit,” Crash said. “I’m worth every penny.”

“He gives this guy in here shit, so the guys follows Crash outside, turns out he wears a badge. He has to fuck pussy that’s not even his, so he finds some drugged-out cunt, the same one gets pinched, and she could run her mouth for a lighter weight.”

“She would’ve done it by now if she was gonna,” Crash said. “More likely she got herself a mouthful of bacon, called him her hero, and then headed to the hills.”

“Maybe,” Ginger said.

“In the long run,” Ginger’s guest said, “everything is compressed down to its essentials. Just a matter of knowing what those are. What mattered about your missing girl: her mouth, or her cunt? And what matters about your boy here?”

Crash lifted his hips; took a handful of his crotch. “Balls of polished steel, motherfucker.”

Ginger laughed, fond of him again, suddenly: erratic in his moods like that, Ginger. They’d probably have sex later, Crash thought, not entirely dispassionately. He didn’t mind it. Ginger wasn’t a glutton for attention or else didn’t notice when he lost it, so mostly whenever they hooked up, Rust let Crash go and thought of other things.

“Crash, this is Ledoux. Ledoux, Crash.”

 _Ledoux_. Mostly Rust’s mind crossed tastes and colors but every so often a word would ripen in his head like a plum. _Ledoux_ , dropsy-heavy on the end, swollen like it wanted to burst. And what would come spilling out? He took a sip of Ginger’s drink. Ginger’s spit on the rim of the glass blister-white.

“Who’s Ledoux and why do I give a shit?”

“He’s a cook,” Ginger said. “You care because you put more shit in your arm than anyone else.”

“I’m a connoisseur.”

Ledoux smiled. “Always happy to meet a customer.”

Ginger’s hand tightened on Crash’s shoulder. “Ledoux’s going to be working with us exclusively.” Which explained why Ginger had wanted Crash around in the first place—Ginger was suspicious of anyone who seemed to be offering him too good of a deal. If Rust ever got enough breathing room, he might hate Ginger as much as he hated Steve fucking Geraci, but Ginger was the drummer behind Crash’s pulse and so Rust-as-Crash aligned with him perfectly, almost admired him. Thought this rudimentary precaution qualified as intelligence. 

“Exclusivity’s nice,” Crash said. Let his tongue tangle on the first word, good and drunk, like he’d gone boneless.

Ledoux didn’t seem like he bought it. His smile flickering in and out like a candle.

“My people like to seal a deal with something other than a drink,” Ledoux said.

“We got women,” Ginger said. Like he’d fucking know.

“I have something else in mind. Absolute guaranteed confidentiality. Done in pale yellow light, beneath some other moon.”

Ginger nodded slowly. “I heard something.”

“Everything disseminates,” Ledoux said, spreading his hands.

“We’re not into—”

“We don’t demand belief.” Ledoux’s smile widened. He had a rotted tooth in the back, didn’t gleam as much as the rest. “Just participation.”

“You’re not coming,” Ginger said to Crash, before he slid out of the other side of the booth. Underneath the table, just before he was gone, he put pressure on Crash’s—Rust’s—knee. Rust had no referent for it. He stumbled out of the other side.

“Sure you don’t want me along?”

“Can’t even stand up straight,” Ginger said.

It took everything Rust had to stay planted in one place—to keep that blowing-in-the-wind side-to-side sway going even as his feet took root—until Ginger and Ledoux were out the door. Then he announced that he had to take a piss.

The men’s room of the bar was nothing but the smell of shit and meth patched together with some caulk and cracked tile. There was always a screwdriver balanced against the mirror, rust or blood on its tip, in case somebody wanted to do a little repair work or a little violence, and Rust thought about the best thing he could say about the place was the screwdriver mostly stayed put for community use and nobody had stolen it yet. He shoved it through the door handle. Precarious balance. And he dialed Campbell. Voicemail. _Fucking asshole._ Punched the numbers in again, harder the second time. _Something is going to happen_. Voicemail, faster this time—two rings. The next time Rust saw him he was going to kill him.

He swung out into the hallway again, screwdriver tucked into his pocket in case things went bad and he needed it.

“We got a phonebook in this hellhole?”

“Who you going to call, asshole?” Tanya-the-bartender. Didn’t like him. Normally fine, because Rust didn’t like Crash either, but he needed a little give right now.

“Gonna order a pizza because your food’s shit.”

“Fuck you, Crash.”

“Get in line, honey. _Phonebook_.”

“Outside by the booth.”

“It’s the service keeps people coming back time and again,” Crash said, slow drawl with the molasses slathered in thick, because he couldn’t have her thinking he was in too much of a hurry.

Outside, in the dim yellow glow from the streetlights and the red from the bar’s neon, he found _Hart, Martin_ ; put one finger there to mark the place and then flipped to the back until he found enough black-and-white pictures of pizzas to pick a name. Back to Marty’s number, real quick, just to make sure he had it, and then he broke the spine at the yellow pages and Sal’s Finest Pizzeria.

Marty answered on the second ring. “Hello?”

For a second, Rust couldn’t say anything. He dug the cotton out of his mouth by thinking about what Ledoux had said— _we don’t demand belief, just participation_. “Yeah,” he said. Lost Crash’s elongation of everything for a second or two, to help Marty realize it was him. “I’m at the Open Road bar. Shit yeah,” to something Marty hadn’t said, a further tip-off, “baddest part of town there is. Better deliver with a piece strapped on. Pepperoni, large. I’d do _pick up_ and not _delivery_ ,” he was fucked if Marty couldn’t follow him, fucked and left bleeding, “but my usual ride’s gone to shit. So I need somebody here. Cheesy crust, too.”

“Yeah,” Marty said slowly. “I got you. You okay?”

“Yeah, but make it fast, motherfucker. I’m hungry.”

He hung up and stood outside for a minute. Tanya didn’t like smoke in the bar—losing battle, most of the time. Maybe she’d slot him into her good graces enough if she saw him light up on the porch that she wouldn’t think too much about the pizza or why he was going to disappear after it showed.

He came back in.

She slid an ashtray across the bar to him.

He held up an empty hand. “Lit, smoked, stubbed, darlin’. I’ll even give you a slice of pizza if you smile at me.”

“Yeah, getting pissy because Ginger pulled out of here without you isn’t as sexy as you think.” She got herself a beer. “Where’d you order?”

“Sal’s.”

“Sal’s is shit.”

“It’s close. I been sitting here playing wasted for who the fuck knows how long just so Ginger could make a new best friend. I’m getting it delivered and I’m going home.”

She didn’t ask why he hadn’t just ordered it to come to the clubhouse, at least, and that was good: Crash was known to be erratic in his decision-making skills and most people blamed that on whatever cocktail they figured was in his system at the time. He put a beer on his tab and drank slowly until he saw headlights pull into the parking lot. Not much traffic this late. He’d take his chances. Slammed the bottle against the bar. “That’ll be it. You get lonely, you know where to find me.”

Tanya rolled her eyes. That was what he needed, what Crash thrived on: indifference that bordered on hatred but didn’t ever become it.

He clocked it as Marty’s car once he got beyond the glare of the sodium-arc lights and shoved as much of himself in front of the window to block Tanya’s view of Marty as he could. If she were looking, which odds were she wasn’t. But if she did, he couldn’t afford her seeing Marty. Ginger had run his mouth off about that asshole cop ever since they’d arranged the bust for Dora. Might be recognizable.

 _You look the same_ , Rust almost said, like six weeks had been six years.

“Listen,” he said, before Marty could open his mouth. “Ginger’s meeting with a Reggie Ledoux, L-E-D-O-U-X is my guest, Ledoux’s car, and something’s going to happen. I’m out of the loop. I need the license plate and an APB, something, Marty, come on.” His mouth tasted sour and he turned his head and spat. “I called Campbell and he put me on fucking voicemail.”

Marty looked like he’d only gotten about one word in four of that but then he said, “Reggie Ledoux, got it. Reginald, probably. You need a ride? You said on the phone that normally you’d ask for a pick-up.”

Then Rust looked past him to the passenger seat and something turned sideways inside his throat. He spoke around it. “You brought a pizza box.”

“It’s empty. I dug it out of the trash so it smells like fucking banana peels and I’ve been—can’t make conversation right now. You want me to pull around to the side and radio?”

Rust shook his head. “Give me the box. Five miles down the road, the next exit, the McDonald’s. I’ll meet you there. The truck will blend better out of the way.”

“See you,” Marty said. He passed Rust the box and it did smell like banana peels. Sour milk and grease underneath that. He couldn’t believe Marty had thought to bring it. He held it angled towards the window of the bar so Tanya could see that white rectangle if she looked.

Marty peeled off and Rust looked at the taillights for a minute before he headed to the truck.


	7. Chapter 7

Rust liked the McDonald’s he’d told Marty to head for—it was one knuckle in the spread-hand of fast food joints that splayed out from the exit and it was the only one that did the vanilla shakes as thick as he liked them. He felt protective of it, mass-market as it was. The consumer buying into the ultimate capitalist utopia. He knew he’s been sold a bill of goods but he has nothing left. When Campbell picked him up, Rust always sent him to the Arby’s or the Bucket o’ Chicken. Marty—he told Marty the McDonald’s without thinking about it. Well, he was distracted.

He picked Marty’s car out underneath a light, the man himself standing outside of it, braced against the door, foot thrown out in the shadow of a golden arch. He was like an arrow aimed for Rust somehow and it was too late to dodge him.

Rust parked alongside and got out, stood there feeling weak, his head frothed like champagne.

He said, “I want a milkshake while we’re here.”

Marty laughed softly and then turned and reached into his car: pulled out one of those egg-carton-looking cardboard containers and a grease-spotted white bag. He tossed the bag at Rust, who almost missed it, and set the drink-container on the roof of the car.

“Big Mac with cheese, fries. Fried apple pie. Coke, not shake. Guess I miscalculated.”

“That’s a shake,” Rust said, jutting his chin at the cup with the thicker straw.

“Yeah,” Marty said. “That one’s mine.”

Rust’s fingers felt unsteady. He tore through the paper bag and what was inside it within minutes. Marty sipped his milkshake and watched. When Rust crumpled the wrapper up into a ball, Marty said, “You going to choke on that?”

“Not likely.”

“You ate it like you hadn’t seen food in a week is why I was wondering.”

“I forget to eat sometimes,” Rust said. He knew Marty would think it a greater misfortune than it was and he felt uneasy about mentioning it, like he was walking a tightrope between Marty’s pity for him, which he didn’t want, and honesty, which felt important in a way it hadn’t in a while. Crash’s forked tongue awkwardly stitched together again; him left trying to shape words with it still healing. “I will if it’s there. It’s a weak point because Crash hasn’t got a reason to space on it, he’s not smart enough to get distracted from his own stomach, but there you go—everybody’s got the one thread that could unravel them.”

“Milkshakes you like, though,” Marty said.

“Vanilla,” Rust said. Marty made a face, which he ignored. “And I like things spicy.”

“Yeah.” Marty was looking at the drive-thru window, not at Rust. “You said Campbell put you on voicemail?”

“I called twice. First rang out all the way, second time to the mailbox after just a couple of rings.”

Marty nodded, absently. “Yeah,” he said again. “Anybody going to notice or care if you stay someplace else tonight?”

“I told Tanya I was going to take the pizza back to the clubhouse. But they think I only do what I say I’m going to do about one time out of six.”

“You don’t strike me as that kind of man.”

He wondered what kind of man Marty thought he was and whether that at all intersected with what he knew of himself.

Marty cleared his throat. “Anyway, you could, you know.” He squinted at the drive-thru window again and Rust almost turned around to see who was working there, as though he would have known who Marty knew and how he knew them. “I got a spare room. Campbell couldn’t have even known what was going on with you,” he added, ears tinged red. It seemed like a strange, irrelevant tangent to Rust. Why he was calling shouldn’t have mattered to Campbell, but Marty seemed to think there were circumstances that would have merited attention more than others. “You could have been in a ditch somewhere for all he knew.”

“I don’t doubt someone’s going to be in a ditch before the night’s through,” Rust said. “One way or the other.”

“Get in the car,” Marty said.

Rust accepted that. Taking orders from Marty felt qualitatively different from taking them from Ginger.

 _I ought to put a shorter leash on you and you wouldn’t get into as much shit_ , Campbell had said to him once. With Marty, he didn’t feel the collar. With Campbell and Ginger he did. He wasn’t sure how much of that was real and how much was programming. His body sent out unreliable signals around Marty—not misfires, but nonetheless not helpful or convenient.

Anyway, he got in the car. Measured the distance between his shoulder and Marty’s.

Marty drove. His jaw was locked tight like he had something tucked in his cheek. Rust didn’t mind the silence, particularly: he steepled his fingers on his lap and tried to let the lights they were passing dissolve and lick against the windows like so many tongues. It wasn’t the first time he had been unable to save someone’s life and although he hadn’t said it yet to Marty, he felt sure the window of opportunity on this had closed. People like Ledoux didn’t always drive registered cars. Back-roads crisscrossed the country like yarn thrown up out of a basket. Too many people were not findable and there had been a delay. He scratched one finger restlessly against the inside of his wrist until the skin burned.

“Hey,” Marty said. “Don’t do that. I don’t like watching it.”

Rust stopped. “This is a nice neighborhood. Two point five kids, a dog, I’m guessing you bring those with you, but the white-picket-fence is already here. American Dream shit.”

“Only the two kids. Never got around to making the point five.” Marty drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. “Always wanted a dog, though. You got a problem with people wanting to be normal?”

“Against people being what’s called normal, none at all. People striving for some commercialized ideal of humanity, on the other hand—well, that just leads to a never-ending chain of bullshit. It’s dissatisfaction sold to us in our dreams.”

“Yeah,” Marty said, “but you like vanilla milkshakes, so who gives a shit what you think?”

“There’s always that,” Rust agreed.

“Audrey and Maisie. Most people ask, when you say you’ve got kids—they ask who your kids are.”

Rust’s chest tightened. “Nice names.”

“Thanks. You see how that was a conversation?” He pulled into the driveway of something low-slung and brick, with tight shutters painted a robin’s egg blue.

Rust didn’t want to say it—especially in the context of the rest of the conversation, about normalcy, children, Americana—but it didn’t seem like the kind of house he’d imagined for Marty. That he had imagined some kind of house for Marty at all came as a surprise to him. Something more open, he thought. With more yard, for the kids and the dog, if Marty ever got one.

He hoped the kids weren’t there. He wasn’t fit to be let into some house with sleeping children, as if he could coexist again in that kind of reality: he was mutually exclusive with that life. (Vanilla milkshakes had been Sophia’s favorite. That blank sweetness was all he had ever been able to stand as remembrance. That rosemary he burned night after night in black-velvet parking lots, his hands too shaky sometimes to get the wrapper off the straw until most of the shake had melted.)

Rust reached for something to say that was nothing he had inside him—he wanted someone else’s thoughts to give to Marty like gift-wrapped chocolates. “The flowers are nice. Those hanging planters. What are they?”

“No idea.” Marty went right up to the door and knocked. When he turned back to Rust, there was a manic grin on his face, one that would have scared him, maybe, if he’d still been capable of fear. “This isn’t my house.”

Campbell answered the door. Sleep lined his skin like he was a creased pillowcase.

Marty continued smiling crazily at him. The grin seemed divorced from his face, like it would float and bob in the air, Cheshire Cat-like, if Marty moved. Rust felt like he had stepped off some steep edge and all that was left was the fall. Damn Marty, to pull away what solid ground he had and give him nothing in return, just this feeling like something was about to happen.

“Until about an hour ago,” Marty said to Campbell, “I entertained a kind of respect for you. Defended you to Rust over here as not a bad guy. Maybe you aren’t. I officially no longer give a shit. But if Rust ever calls you and you don’t pick up the fucking phone, I swear to God I will come to this place and I will lay you flat on the ground and by the time I’m done with you, you won’t get up again. Not then and not ever.”

Campbell’s mouth flattened. “You sanctimonious asshole. You want him to be your problem? He gets high. The shit he says, no one’s ever said before, you didn’t even know the words wet together. You think you can take him to Waffle House a time or two and he behaves like a person, doesn’t cause a scene, you think he’s fine, he’s _not fine_ , Marty, he’s a train-wreck. He’s been passed around more times than syphilis. And he gives good intel, so why do you think that is?”

“He’s too smart for you,” Marty said. Hell-bound loyalty and nothing else.

Rust knew what he was. Crash knew what he was. He was poison. He was erosion. He hated Campbell more than Marty did but sympathized more with him, too, at least now, because Campbell hadn’t said anything Rust didn’t already know.

“He’ll eat you out like acid,” Campbell said. “If you want him, he’s yours. Actually, fuck you. Even if you don’t want him, he’s yours. There aren’t any strings on him. Narcotics doesn’t own him anymore than anybody else. No one owns him, Marty. Nobody wants him. Nobody but you.” He looked at Rust, who felt like Crash, like his body was wrong. “And you know I’m right, Crash. You know.” Like he was in AA and Rust was at the bottom of every bottle of booze he hadn’t managed to pour down the sink. Maybe he was.

Rust didn’t feel the need to apologize for it. People were unchangeable. Him in particular. “I know what I am. I console myself that I’m not what you are.”

Campbell laughed shortly. “Fine. The two of you deserve each other. Marty, nobody knows you. Nobody really does. You are a son of a bitch. A psychopath for all I know. And you think you and him are, what, Batman and Robin. You’re Bonnie and Clyde.”

“As long as I’m Clyde,” Marty said.

Campbell reached out of sight of the door and his hand came back with the black phone in it, the one Rust bought out of his own pocket and gave to all his handlers, like there was something in the sturdiness of it that would for once ensure a lifeline when he needed one. It never had before.

“Here,” Campbell said. “You come near me at work again, I’ll tear your head off.”

“ _L’chaim_ ,” Rust said to him, because he felt he had said too little.

Campbell didn’t even look at him before he closed the door in their faces.

Rust processed it, a little: that Marty had known Campbell well enough to know where he lived and that he would sure as shit no longer be invited over for barbecues. He watched Marty put the cellphone in his pocket after weighing it in his hand for a minute. Neither one of them said anything about the drawing Rust had done or what he had said about how Marty made it impossible for him to compartmentalize. The phone was already in Marty’s pocket like everything they were was some foregone conclusion.

Rust said, “I didn’t give a shit about the hanging plants. I was just trying to be polite when I thought it was your place.”

Marty made a chuffing sound that, in the absence of whatever adrenaline burn he was surely coming down from, would have passed for a laugh. “Don’t ever change, Rust.” He sounded fond. Rust had few enough referents for that, but he was convinced of it all the same. He stood unsteadily on the porch for a moment and then followed Marty back to the car.

*

“Lots of windows,” Rust said. “This the right house this time, or are we going around town to people who’ve pissed you off?”

“This is the right house.”

He unlocked the front door to prove it and Rust trailed in behind him. He felt like he was covered in some invisible dirt he would track through Marty’s life—he scuffed his shoes against the welcome mat but left them on because Marty just moved ceaselessly forward like a shark, as if stopping for even a second would mean admitting he’d found himself in water deeper than he’d intended. So Rust followed him and tried not to touch anything. It helped to remember the divorce. Marty hadn’t broken the house in yet and there were places where it still didn’t quite seem like this, where the walls resisted leaning out to touch him, where the carpets weren’t matted, where the smell of cardboard from moving boxes still lingered in the air. The ceilings were painted cream and tasted like flat Sprite.

Marty led him past a room that had too much pink and purple in it. Overcompensation. He saw, through the doorway, some signs of actual, occasional child-habitation: a stuffed zebra with a ragged mane, a table with broken crayons on it, a half-assembled Lego fortress. He averted his eyes.

The last bedroom was Marty’s, Marty explained, in a touch that seemed unnecessary. Marty’s voice had gone awkward.

“You can sleep in here,” he said, opening the door to his left.

Rust had been expecting something like a hotel room, as blank as the girls’ room had been little-girl feminine, but it had its raggedy zebras, too: a table where Marty put together fishing flies, a bookshelf of Stephen King and Tom Clancy novels, a lamp with a stained glass shade. He liked it. It felt like some offshoot of Marty, as relevant to him as a hand. He didn’t have the same fear of sullying it as he did the rest of the house because Marty seemed impervious to him. He shut out Campbell’s voice from his head.

“I keep waiting for you to put down a bag, but I guess you don’t have one.” Marty ran his fingers through his hair. “I got a spare toothbrush from the dentist.”

“I’ve spent nights on less,” Rust said. He examined the fishing flies and added, without looking behind him, “I grew up in Alaska. Had to make my own mattress out of whatever I could find when I was eleven, in case the world ended.”

“Sounds like you come by your strangeness natural, then.”

“A stranger in a long line of them. I don’t doubt I’m more so. In case you were wondering.”

Marty shrugged, one-shouldered. “You’re not like anybody else. I’m regular enough to make up for it.”

Rust didn’t know what he was thinking to say that. He’d met plenty of people and what he was sure of was that Marty wasn’t any of them. But Marty cultivated dimness like a garden, like he could grow enough thorny stupidity to choke out the weeds of his better nature. Even for Claire, Rust had never written out Valentine’s Day cards. The one time he’d tried, she’d looked over his shoulder halfway through and told him he ought to quit: “It looks like Shakespeare’s trying to thank me for a blowjob and also telling me I’m going to turn into my mother and let me tell you, Rust, it’s not working for me.” 

“I’m used to you talking more,” Marty said.

“I already said before you being normal was bullshit.”

He said it to watch Marty’s face tighten. It was the moral equivalent, loosely, of scraping the inside of his wrist raw. He tried to remember how much heroin he had in the glassine bag in his pocket and though it was enough to get him high, if he’d be okay with shooting up in Marty’s guestroom, which he shouldn’t have been but most likely would be.

Marty’s eyebrows had gotten all pulled together at the center in a scrunch as revealing as a child’s. Rust said, “I didn’t ask you to do anything for me.” He differentiated because he’d asked for Marty to come to the bar, not for him—for whoever Ginger and Ledoux were homing in on, blinking red lights on a black field. The confrontation with Campbell: he hadn’t asked for that. And he hadn’t asked to like it.

“Yeah,” Marty said. “You don’t always have to ask people.” He left and came back with the toothbrush, still in its plastic case. Rust took it: it felt flimsy.

Rust said, carefully, “I have to be back in the morning. Well, afternoon, really. Nobody around there gets up until it’s past noon.” He felt like he was warning Marty about something, not telling him when he needed a ride: _I’m not a part of this._

“I’ll set the alarm,” Marty said, like he didn’t get it, but before he went out the door again, he said, deliberately casual, “You can come here when you need to get away, you know. Alternate weekends—that’s the only time I have the girls. Otherwise the place is pretty empty.”

It was Marty’s life that was empty, not the house, Rust thought as he undressed. He walked over to the fishing flies and touched the delicate rachis points of the feathers. The mistake was trying to think Rust would fill whatever absence there was when Rust himself was hollow. _Marty_ , he wanted to say, _I’m just more emptiness_. He took down one of the feathers that gave him the same taste as the gestalt of Marty—sun-struck skin, corn-colored hair, eyes like glass. He slept with it stuck to the sweat of his palm. In the morning it looked too bedraggled to go back on the table, so he kept it. Already he’d created more hollow places.

If he weren’t such a coward, he’d tell Marty a second time to stay away from him.

“Nobody found your guy last night,” Marty said. He was plugging in a waffle-maker, either because he wanted waffles or he wanted something to look at instead of Rust. Rust edged up onto a barstool at the counter and looked at the fruit-bowl so at least neither one of them would be looking in the right direction. “Must’ve been the late start.”

“Campbell,” Rust said.

“Hey.” Marty’s anger like the waffle-maker—he plugged it in and unplugged it, so that it had gotten cool by morning. “As far as I know, the guys you’re in with don’t exactly swing by the OMV and get themselves up-to-date.”

Rust had thought that himself, but as far as he was concerned, it didn’t exonerate Campbell, it only made the minutes in which Campbell might have been helpful more significant. But Marty wanted to see the good in people.

“You need me to warm up syrup?”

“Shit, you’re civilized after all. Yeah, it’s in the cupboard.”

Rust got it and heated it up. It wasn’t real maple syrup, just imitation. The last time he’d bought any, he’d been living with Claire, and he’d said that there was no way their daughter was growing up mistaking that sugared-up barely-amber bullshit for the real thing and so he’d added _REAL MAPLE SYRUP_ to the shopping list every time, Claire’s mouth always crinkling into a smile at that, Rust’s one luxury. He was glad Marty only had the thin artificial kind.

“I’ll find out what I can from Ginger. He gets talkative sometimes.” No need to say when. “I’ll get back to you.”

Marty blinked, like he’d only just remembered that he didn’t have the phone just so he could call Rust in for waffles and small talk. “All right, yeah. That’d be good.”

Rust felt the grin and suppressed it. “First time, sugar?”

Marty’s face was a bright red that tasted like cinnamon. “Smart-ass. I think I like you better when you’re talking about how you saw a dead deer walloped by a car and it reminds you of humanity. I didn’t have an undercover before. Didn’t need one. I think you brought all the organized crime with you from Texas.”

“It’s been around,” Rust said. “It’s just half-blind on moonshine and inbred.”

Marty dished up the first waffle. “I’ve seen you half-blind on worse than moonshine.”

“You ain’t seen me high at all, Marty, you’ve seen me acting it to get under Campbell’s skin.” The one line he had in the sand was that he never got high, if he had a choice, before a meet-up: a resolution that had taken up more space inside his head since he’d met Marty. “I guess I’ll drop that for the time being.”

“You’re chipper.”

“Transitions,” Rust said. “Affords everybody the illusion of thinking this time they’ll do their life differently. Don’t give Geraci the phone, even if you think you’re going to be busy.”

“You think I’d hand you off to Steve?”

“I think you like people,” Rust said. “It’s worth making sure you remember I don’t.”

Marty slid the plate across the bar to him. “If you started liking people, I think I’d notice.”


	8. Chapter 8

Rust got back to the clubhouse around eight in the morning. Nobody else was up—he’d told Marty they wouldn’t be. He stripped down and got between the sheets, curled on his side, and watched the shadows of the leaves outside cast pirouettes down his wall. Sometimes they widened out like cupped hands. The color of their darkness dried out his mouth. He had almost made up his mind to get up and start drinking until he forgot the way the syrup had shined up Marty’s mouth when Ginger came in.

He smelled like blood and clay. Rust sat up in bed, not Crash yet, dizzy. “Jesus, Ginger. What did you do?”

Ginger’s face was pale, puffed, slack, like the underside of some log given over to rot and tiered fungus. He stumbled over to Rust’s dresser with the busted drawer and got the whiskey bottle out. No points, Rust thought, for guessing how he’d known it was there: Ginger was a fucking sneak on the best of days and his days with Rust had never been the best of him. He poured the Jack over his hands slowly, letting it drip all down the floor. Rust got up. The scuffed wood against his bare feet seemed to lend him some solidity, but he crept along towards Ginger without stepping into Crash’s skin. He said, “You’re wasting good booze, motherfucker,” in an impression with no heart.

“I gotta stay in here with you,” Ginger said.

There was no precedent for that. Ginger was Ginger, hard and high-up, arguable leader, murderer, thief, dealer, runner, but that could all get undermined if somebody caught him up in Crash’s bed. Not to mention what would happen to Crash. When he’d joined up, back in Houston, somebody—not Ginger, who’d been trying to get in his pants—told him that the one time they caught one of theirs with a rent-boy, they’d shoved a hot curling iron up his asshole. Crash had inquired further: turned out they’d had to go buy the curling iron special. That amount of dedication to a preconceived plan had persuaded him to be careful, until he got two tabs of acid in him and started remembering how he’d helped pick out the dress they’d buried Sophia in, and torture had started to seem trivial.

“You can’t,” Rust said.

“I got to.” Ginger started tugging his clothes off. More blood on his wife-beater, along with dried vomit. There was a gash against the bottom of his ribs that Rust got a glimpse of as the shirt rode up. Tears standing out in Ginger’s eyes like broken glass. “Say no again and I’ll kill you.” His voice was very calm, the only thing about him that was. He meant it.

It occurred to Rust that Ginger might have known it would be bad and that had been why he’d said Crash was too drunk to go. That Ginger in some lopsided way might have tried to protect him—even if he’d only kill Rust himself later—didn’t make Rust like him any better, but it disoriented him, somehow, reminded him of how sometimes he’d catch a bright flash of light, like a lens flare, out of the corner of his eye. The acid reworking his brain.

“Yeah,” Rust said.

Ginger left his pants on. Left his belt on, too.

Rust got back into bed and let Ginger crawl in with him. Ginger’s breath was hot, strong: decay, booze, bar food. He put his hand over Rust’s navel. He didn’t say anything. He just lay pressed against Rust’s back, so close Rust could feel the low tremor running through him.

Rust needed to be Crash, but Crash wouldn’t have let Ginger do this, no matter how much Ginger claimed to need it: he would have fought Ginger until there was blood on his teeth. He’d slipped out-of-character. Did he want to pretend Ginger was Marty? That wasn’t a fantasy liable to end without bloodshed. Or was it just the undercover’s hedged bet—the safest thing here was to let Ginger have his way. Go along to get along. Never mind the cookie-cutter he’d stamped out in the shape of Crash would leave this outside its circlet.

“What happened?” Rust said.

“I kept you out of it. Now shut the fuck up.”

That coming from Ginger, who bragged, who talked a blue streak about murders, deals, scrapes, hassles, enough that Rust could bury him: all those words adding up to one hell of a sentence, once Ginger stopped being useful to him. He went back to tracing shadows and thinking what it would have to mean for Ginger to not talk.

They separated around nine. Ginger’s eyes were still showing too much white.

Rust waited for him to say, “Tell anyone about this and I’ll kill you,” and then wasn’t disappointed. Ginger liked to be cliché where he could.

He gave Ginger a thirty-second count to get back to his own room and then he called Marty, who answered on the first ring.

“Kids,” Rust said. He had to loosen his hold on the phone or he’d crack it. “You’re looking for something with kids.”

*

Marty called him in three days later.

“I don’t know much about how to do this,” Marty said.

He’d called at five-forty in the morning and his voice still sounded sleep-thick and full of burrs, like he was still in bed and had just rolled over, gotten the phone off the nightstand, and dialed Rust with one of his ears still stuck against the pillow. Rust had no business thinking about that, but he appreciated Marty calling early: it showed a kind of good sense that had been lacking with Campbell and most of the handlers he’d had since Morales, who had called whenever it occurred to them to want him, so that Rust would get buzzes during poker games with Ginger or once while shooting up. But he had told Marty that the guys were never up early and Marty had remembered that and gone even earlier, like it meant something to him whether he got Rust killed or not. It was good for the assignment that at least one of them gave a damn about his life.

Rust had sat up reflexively at the rasp of the phone against the inside of the drawer where it spent the night. He ran a hand through his hair and tried to get his thoughts in order. He was seeing the walls streaked with black like somebody’d been finger-painting them: it was an association he didn’t want to make.

“You do it fast and I come up with the excuses,” Rust said.

Marty chuckled a little. “Sounds like a relationship.”

“That fast to you, making small talk, double entendre?”

“Fast as you want, sugar,” Marty said.

The black streaks on the walls flashed to an indigo and then faded away.

Marty, Rust told himself, was still half-asleep, and probably more than a little drunk besides: it gave him context for the thickness of Marty’s voice.

“Later today,” Rust said. “You pick a time.”

“When are you looking to have lunch?”

He sighed. “Dammit, M—” He bit back the name. There was no surety to be had that no one was listening to him and he would not put Marty Hart’s name in the air in this place. “I can’t do your job and mine at the same time.”

“Noon, then. Same Mickey D’s?”

“Same one.” He rubbed a finger against his teeth and tried to remember if he’d brushed them the night before. “I’m guessing you’ve got news.”

“Something’s come up,” Marty said, carefully neutral, and Rust heard it again in his voice: the aftermath of drink. He wondered if Marty’s marriage had ended because of Marty’s lack of talent at pretending to an innocence of awful things. He had no bureaucrat in him. If he ever became captain, somebody’d eat him alive. “We can talk about it later. I thought you wanted fast.”

“Fast as you want,” Rust said, and hung up.

*

Marty was already waiting for him in the parking lot. This time he had a vanilla milkshake balanced on the hood of his car: vanilla milkshake and a greasy plastic snap-container of pasta, the one thing Marty seemed to think he knew how to make. “Carbonara,” Marty said. “Maggie says it’s supposed to be okay to eat it cold. The raw egg cooks out. My mom was always hard on raw egg, saying you couldn’t taste the batter, but if you get the pasta hot, toss it around for a while, it cooks the egg.”

Salmonella hadn’t been Rust’s first concern. Marty had forgotten a fork, apparently, so Rust was stuck with one of the plastic McDonald’s ones. He ate in the passenger seat, the Tupperware balanced on his knees, as Marty drove them to Baton Rouge.

Twice, and only twice, he tried to broach the real subject of the meeting, but Marty kept turning the radio up and singing tunelessly. Billy Joel, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Pink Floyd.

“This is what I mean, man,” Rust said, looking out the window as the countryside loped by on long green feet. “A sense of culture you buy at Wal-Mart, fished out of the bargain bin. A Trampoline in the yard, some dog-shit, and Billy Joel.”

“Nobody likes Billy Joel, Rust,” Marty said, in educator tones. “It’s just that they play him so often everybody’s got him memorized. People sing the songs they know.”

“That’s the truth, in more ways than one.”

“I don’t want to hear about the other ways.”

“Then thanks for the milkshake.”

Marty looked at him briefly. “Don’t mention it.”

Don’t mention it, _sugar_ , Rust appended. He didn’t know if Marty remembered that or not. One way or another, he guessed they weren’t talking about it.

It wasn’t often men picked out Rust was queer. Women were better at it: Claire had known right away. Had never taken for granted that she was the only shape his desire had ever found. She’d cared about fidelity, not proclivity.

His old man, too, had known and pronounced it irrelevant.

Rust got the word _bisexual_ from a boy in a club in Phoenix when he was twenty, had borrowed it off him like a Kleenex or a dime, something taken with no intention to return, but with no intention to keep. He believed in names, had spent a summer reading Audubon books, but his own internal landscape didn’t need cartography much when there was no one who sought to annex him as territory. No one he had to explain himself to.

Now he had to waste time thinking about whether or not Marty knew. Let alone whether Marty had bullheaded confidence in a half-truth—had guessed Ginger but dismissed Claire—which didn’t bother him on any principle other than accuracy and an itchy resistance to oversimplification. As to whether Marty knew any of it or not—that had to be behind his sloppy occasional attempts at charm, like peaking Rust’s interest was a stick he could whittle at night to keep his hands busy until something better came along. So he knew, or guessed, something. And it was all a distraction from Ledoux, every bit of it, from Marty’s spaghetti carbonara to his hair lifting up in the wind to Rust thinking about how much he thought about it, and whether Marty did. A lack of compartmentalization again.

Buried lusts along this road like stones marking the graves of dead children. Whatever he thought was happening with Marty wasn’t. Only Reggie Ledoux was real, only Ginger’s hand on Crash’s belly, only Sophia.

He blinked: they were in Marty’s driveway.

“Professional,” Rust said dryly.

“I thought you’d like to be somewhere where Campbell wouldn’t get a glimpse of you, at least for a while. I know I would. The man wants to piss in my coffee at fifteen paces and I can’t see his face without wanting to beat the living shit out of him.” He got out of the car and waited for Rust, then leaned over the hood. “I thought about getting that dog for you. The dog and half a kid. Except that didn’t seem funny anymore.”

Rust’s throat closed up. “Wasn’t intended as a joke to begin with.”

“Yeah, you’re not known for your sense of humor. Come on. Bring the milkshake and I’ll make it Irish. You’re not going to want to hear this sober.”

They went inside. Rust didn’t look at children’s drawings on the fridge and he didn’t let Marty spike the milkshake, not from any sense of decency for the on-the-clock hours but out of the hindbrain superstition that Sophia would mind. They sat at the barstools in the kitchen. Rust asked for permission to smoke and got it after Marty handed him down a saucer marked around the edges with tiny blue flowers to use as an ashtray.

“You gonna tell me or we gonna stall more?”

“Two kids,” Marty said. “A boy and a girl. Do you need the details of who they were, where they’re from, what they looked like? Because by the end, Rust, they didn’t look like much of anything. My God, Rust. I’ve seen some things in my time. I thought about that when you asked me for help with Dora.”

 _I didn’t ask_ , Rust thought. _You volunteered_. He remembered that specifically because it had seemed like a talisman he could have rubbed when there was nothing left to hold onto.

“But I’ve never seen anything like this,” Marty said. “I’ve still got Steve’s puke on my shoes and the only reason I don’t have mine is I leaned further out. Even when I was a rookie, I kept my shit together at a crime scene. But these kids, Rust, they had those crepe-paper crowns on their heads like they were at a birthday party. And antlers, with the antlers, somebody’d—” He put the back of his hand to his mouth and breathed in. “I don’t think I’ll look at some rack a guy’s got over his fireplace again. I see one, I’ll walk out. Put up one of those singing rubber fish that’re annoying as all hell, but—I close my eyes, I see those children. The flies had gotten to them and laid eggs in the corners of their eyes. We had to wait a while on the coroner so I watched one hatch. That’s when I threw up. In case you were wondering.”

Rust couldn’t swallow anything so he pushed the milkshake away from him. He thought about the pictures on Marty’s fridge and reached out and took Marty’s hand without thinking about it and put pressure on it for a second, like he was trying to get the pulse through the palm. Marty squeezed back and then let go.

“Sexual assault?” Rust said.

Marty nodded. His face was pasty, and whose face had Rust seen like that but Ginger’s? Marty because he’d seen what had happened to the children and Ginger because he’d done it. Rust felt some long wet fuse inside him finally smolder to its endpoint. Something had combusted. He thought of Ginger’s hands on him, went to Marty’s kitchen sink, and gagged over it, long ropy strings of vanilla. Marty’s hand settled uncertainly on his back.

“Fine,” Rust said. “Fine.” He shook the touch off. “You have to wonder if the skin we wear even means anything. I knew it had to be kids because Ginger’s done everything else and I’ve never seen him shook up, but he was, that morning. White as paper. He said he’d kept me from it. That motherfucker came and got in my bed and took an hour to shake off the rape and murder of two children and wanted me to be grateful he didn’t get me invited along.”

“Bed?” Marty said. Then he shook his head. “You’re saying he’s maybe not got his head on right about this yet. You could flip him?”

“I’m not giving him the chance to say it was someone else’s fault.”

“He did it to get in with Ledoux, means Ledoux’s calling the shots—if we can use your guy as leverage—”

But the possessive linking him to Ginger only angered him more. “You can’t talk about this like it’s something we’re gonna do, Marty. He _killed them_. He— _everything_. He was there. He doesn’t get off the hook for it because he felt bad about the cost of doing business, when he looked it over and decided he’d pay it.”

Marty took one of Rust’s cigarettes and lit it. “He’s a fucking criminal, Rust,” he said, in a voice that was as tightly wound as Rust had ever heard from him. “What did you expect?”

“Nothing,” Rust said. He breathed out. Breathed in Marty’s cast-off smoke. “I had no expectations. But you’re acting like you’ve got hopes.”

“There’s no way he walks on it,” Marty said softly. “But if you don’t bring him in, you leave Ledoux out there, and who knows what happens?”

“Nothing,” Rust said again. “Not for a while. Think about it, Marty.” He moved his stool closer to Marty and it squeaked on the floorboards. “This was Ledoux asking Ginger to sign in blood in some language he’s got we don’t even know the alphabet of. Antlers. Paper crowns. It’s a buy-in, but after that, they’ll play for smaller stakes for a while. Ginger wants him as a cook and now he’s got him. Means he’ll be coming by every so often—I can get in with him. I met him. Whole lot of nowhere behind his eyes says he didn’t come up with any of this. You want to spin Ginger into Ledoux? I want to spin Ledoux into whoever’s behind him. And we don’t get there rolling fucking baby-raping shitbirds like Ginger up the ladder.”

“Everything you’re saying, I’m hearing,” Marty said. “So why do I still think you just want to kill this guy?”

“You think somebody with regrets is still somebody,” Rust said. “But he’s not, Marty. Everybody’s nobody, and maybe Ginger more than most.”

Marty coughed. Must not have smoked in a while. He wiped his mouth off with the back of his hand.

“Your guy, Rust? He’s just a guy. Just a man. Reggie Ledoux’s the same. You follow your chain wherever you want it to go and you’re still going to find people. Not the devil incarnate. Not— _nothingness_ , whatever the fuck that means. Men who take shits and get love-handles and scratch the dog around the ears, before or after they kick it to death. You want to make it existential, but it’s not that they’re nobody, Rust. It’s that in the whole of everybody there’s a few you just want to say don’t count. And I don’t give a shit, really. There are days I don’t want to either. I look at the human race and ask if it’d be better off with your friend Ginger alive or dead and I know what I’m thinking. But the job says you don’t ask. And you’re still on the job, Rust. You’re not a cowboy. Campbell didn’t think you were a cop, I think you’re a cop. And you’re gonna work this like it’s a job. Not like you’ve got a bloody sword you’re waiting to use. And not because someone led you on.”

Rust supposed it was a speech that would have worked on some. It had the feel of something cribbed from a war movie, like Marty should have had dirt on his face from the trenches, and at the end of it someone should have cheered. Enough backwards leaps of logic in it to qualify for the Olympics and maybe even win, for its passion and its sense of showmanship. Crowd-pleasing sentiments: everybody’s human and _I believe in you, you can do this job_.

He chose to focus on the end, which he had less contempt for. “He didn’t lead me on.”

Marty looked away. “It’s not my business,” he said gruffly.

He’d made it his business when he’d made the insinuation. “We fuck,” Rust said. “Sometimes he gets talkative afterwards. It’s been an asset. It’s not going to happen again.”

Marty nodded. “You couldn’t,” he said. “After.” He let the preposition dangle like a hook, like any weight he put on it would be strong enough to rip out his tongue. He hesitated. “Campbell didn’t ask you to—”

“Nobody asked me to,” Rust said. “It was a judgment call.”

“When you break things off, is he going to be a problem?”

“Violent?”

“Violent, suspicious.”

“He’s both as a condition of getting out of bed in the morning. But not the way you mean, and it’s not gonna break so much as taper. There’s not much there. You’ve got an inch of ash.”

Marty ground it out. He said, “I don’t want you getting hurt.”

Marty was the kind of person who would have said _I’m sorry for your loss_ at Sophia’s funeral and _The job’s a hell of a thing, the things you see_ when Rust made the shot that buried him alive in Crash’s skin. _It’s not the heat but the humidity_. Rust could see it all laid out before him as tireless and persistent as some slow geothermal shift. That Marty could care, and be so ordinary in caring, struck him as somehow remarkable, like a china dog had just learned to bark. People like Marty were not supposed to touch upon people like him.

Then Marty said, “He’d probably be a nightmare if you forgot if it was paper for this anniversary or wood,” and Rust snorted, a noise that sounded even to himself like a surprised horse.

Ordinary, but not ordinary. Like he knew exactly what it took to keep Rust interested and so keep him alive.

*

When Marty let Rust out of the car at the McDonald’s, he said, “Don’t pull Ginger in. Get what you can on Ledoux, see if it leads anywhere. And watch your back.”

Rust felt whatever it was between them gather up like electricity in the sky. “Thanks. About time you gave me some actual work to do.”

“I’m giving you this,” Marty said. “You gonna admit I’m right? About people being people?”

“Never admit to anything I don’t believe,” Rust said.

“Says the man who lies about his own name for a living.”

“Not with you,” Rust said.

Marty’s eyes were behind sunglasses and therefore invisible. He said, “Next time I’ll drive you really wild. Take you to Steak ‘n’ Shake.”


	9. Chapter 9

**PART THREE**

It was two months before Rust saw Reggie Ledoux again. Life went on, wound in tight patterns like a corkscrew.

Marty took him to Steak ‘n’ Shake, as promised. Took him out for hot wings. Said that one day if they had enough time they would drive to the Gulf and eat shrimp po’boys. Rust didn’t tell him that by whatever day they had that much time, he would probably be dead. He liked to picture Marty on the coast.

He spent another night in Marty’s guest room. “Your room,” Marty called it. Rust didn’t pretend to that kind of permanence, but he left a change of clothes in the closet and let Marty keep his toothbrush from the first night in the cup in the bathroom. The second night led into a third, fourth, fifth. The time away from the clubhouse was made easier by spreading the rumor that he’d hooked up with a woman with her own place and some high-quality coke. (Marty sighed: let him break into the evidence locker again. He looked at Marty’s handwriting on cardboard boxes like the loops of letters were significant.)

Ginger didn’t talk to him. He seemed to look at Rust as evidence that would be better off buried.

“He’s going to put a shovel to the back of my neck in some dark field and lay me down,” Rust said to Marty. He was stepping on the coke, mixing in baking powder and laxatives, a process Marty seemed fascinated by and watched like it was television. “He’s thinking about it, gnawing at it like a bone. And when he decides, I’ve got to jump. We do business with one or two other MCs that work with Ledoux, rumor has it, and I’ve got credentials enough to sign up. You’ll have to front me something—more coke, a body.”

“Sure,” Marty said. “I’ll let you kill Steve.”

“Not that I don’t appreciate it,” Rust said, “but the one time I did it before, they just let me put a hole in a natural death, unclaimed. We’re all disposable flesh.”

“You don’t talk much about it,” Marty said.

“ _It_ lacks a definition.”

Marty shrugged, one-shouldered. “Job before me, before Campbell. Where you’re from. Texas.”

“You’ve gotten a glimpse or two of the life I live, the details of the job. Doesn’t vary much by state. What’s this thickener?”

“Maggie brought it home from the hospital when Maisie was sick one time and had trouble swallowing. You do it by spoonfuls, goes nectar-thick, honey-thick, pudding-thick. Anyway, Maisie got better and then it was just Maggie daring me to try pudding-thick water. You get the urge to do that, don’t. How deep in the cabinet you have to go for that, anyway?”

“Not too deep,” Rust said. “Looked about the right color and consistency. You haven’t lived here a long time, which means you brought it with you.”

“I don’t know. It made her laugh. I kind of like remembering there was a time when I made her laugh. But hell, she laughs now, just not at what I want her to.” He pointed at Rust. “And we were supposed to be on you, remember?”

“Lived in Alaska before I lived in Texas.” Rust put some of the thickener on his fingertip and tasted it; added it in. “No mother to speak of. Father’s still there. We stockpiled some, lived as much as we could off what we could hunt or fish. He had it in his head the world might come to an end and there are days I think he’s right about it. Never liked the cold, so I headed south.”

Marty hummed in the back of his throat. “Campbell told me, back when we first met, that the reason you were stuck in this fuckup of an assignment was buried in a file somewhere.”

Rust kept his eyes on the coke. “I killed somebody.”

Marty looked at him for a minute or two and then went to the fridge and came back with two bottles of beer. He gave one to Rust.

Rust preferred cans to bottles because the amber color of beer tasted strongly of salt and overpowered the hops. At the moment, though, his tongue felt numb. He opened the bottle against the bar-top.

“Meth-head. He injected his daughter. Said the crystal would burn the bad stuff out and she wouldn’t cry anymore. I shot him in the head.”

“It’s hard to see some of the shit—”

“Because my daughter,” Rust said, and Marty stilled, went motionless as fast as a deer in the middle of the road, “died two months before. She was on her tricycle. Someone came around the bend in the road. One of those things they say is nobody’s fault.” He breathed out. He drank as much of the beer as he could and then stumbled up off the stool. He put his hand into the coke, a graceless and greedy shove, brought some out, and snorted it off the webbing between his first finger and thumb. Marty let him.

“I didn’t belong to myself anymore. Didn’t belong to Claire. Property of the State Police like it was stamped on me, stamped or branded. I shot him and killed myself.” He blinked. “Nobody called me Rust since Claire until you came along.”

Marty nodded. “What was your daughter’s name?”

Rust felt conscious of his heart inside his chest. Not the center of emotions but the center of blood, but it beat out its own lie that it was the end of every metaphor. That she had been the entirety of his heart.

“Sophia.”

If Marty asked how old she had been, Rust would shatter.

Instead, Marty said, “Wisdom. --Don’t look at me like that, Maggie made me go through the baby books when she was pregnant. Figures you’d name a kid something like that.” He put his hand around the back of Rust’s head and put his fingers in his hair. “I don’t know anything about getting people through this kind of high, but everybody on Wall Street does coke, so I figure as long as you’re up you should take a look at my 401k or something.”

Rust kissed him.

The only rule he’d had about life since Sophia was to try to burn it down whenever he could and Marty was his only good thing. Rust concentrated on Marty’s lips and the slight roughness of his stubble. Different from kissing Ginger, the only other man he’d kissed lately. The inside of Marty’s mouth was beery and warm and he tasted like nobody else. He sent Rust reaching for equivalencies, for similes: Marty tasted like any minute now he’d stop kissing Rust back (when had he started?) and say that they’d try the beer thickened. Nectar, honey. He let Marty push him back against the counter. Fake marble, everyone trying to pretend to one socioeconomic sliver higher than where they really were. Cheap enough that it jarred a little when Rust knocked against it. Then Marty said, “Sorry,” and kissed him forwards as easily as he’d kissed him back.

Rust got him onto the sofa. The coke buzzing in his system.

Then Marty said, “Hang on,” and pulled off of him. “Damn. I don’t think I’ve done that kind of kissing since high school. Maybe all my girlfriends back then were coked-up and talking about their dead kids.” He stroked Rust’s hair a little more self-consciously than he’d kissed him, like there was only one permutation of this kind of thing he was used to. “I don’t think much of your sense of timing. Did you think that would work or were you set on it not?”

“You talk like somebody who did his fair share of marriage counseling.”

“Yeah. It had its perks. Maggie got inspired to tie me up one time and another time she called the therapist an interfering asshole.”

“Wanting to do something and wanting it to fail aren’t exclusive of each other,” Rust said.

“They would be for most people.”

“Most people don’t understand their own motivations.”

“It’s a good thing for all of us you’re here to explain the world to itself.” But he hadn’t stopped that petting. Rust didn’t remember the last time he’d been touched and hadn’t wanted to get away from it. But the coke did.

“Blood’s humming too much for me to stay still, Marty.”

“I got a treadmill in the garage. Punching bag, too. You feel like running or beating the shit out of something?”

 _I feel like fucking you_. “Little bit of both.”

Marty grinned.

“Come on then. Sweat some of that shit out of your system.”

Marty didn’t have a speed bag but Rust worked the heavy one for a while and stomached Marty’s critiques—“You got to move your feet around more, like Rocky”—on account of him still tasting Marty in the corners of his mouth. The gloves were Marty’s, too, well-broken in. Marty said he got them after the divorce and Rust thought about male sublimation of violence and how it was acceptable only as long as it worked. He hoped with Marty it always did because with him it hadn’t, and one of them, at least, needed to be safe. He beat into the leather his imagining of the two of them paired together in his thoughts like two forked branches on the same tree: impossible and so a waste of time to think about. Whatever Marty thought. Marty not being the best judge of reality.

“The focus here has got to be Ledoux,” Rust said. “Ledoux in one hand and the children in the other. You never gave me their names.”

“You seemed like the kind of person might get stuck on something,” Marty said. “I didn’t want to aid and abet.”

“Names, dammit.”

“Violet Henson and Jimmy Wales.”

“Violet and Jimmy.” He circled the bag. Moved his feet like Rocky. “I don’t think what happened between us needs to repeat itself.”

Marty reached out and caught the bag, but that didn’t mean Rust had to stop hitting it. He kept working it, hard, from as many angles as he could get without stepping on Marty.

“You kissed me, Rust. I didn’t lay a hand on you till you laid one first.”

He thought of Marty’s hand, awkward in his hair. And Violet and Jimmy.

“Like you said, I never did have a sense of timing. We have shit on our radar that needs to stay there, not get covered up by something else. And whatever I could offer you that way would be real short-lived, Marty. The half-life it’s got means it’s already decaying.”

“Just so we’re clear,” Marty said slowly, “I turned you down back there because I’d just watched you do a mountain of coke off your hand and because I had it my head you were maybe not in the right state of mind, talking about your daughter the way you’d been. I wasn’t closing any kind of door. I don’t know what it is about you, Rust.”

“This where you say you’ve never been with a man before?”

“Why, you get that a lot? Ginger tell you that?”

“Ginger doesn’t tell me shit. But you seem like the type.”

“Straight?” And Marty peacocked a little, like that was the end goal of every decision he made, to look like somebody who’d never kissed another man.

Rust shook his head: not so much a negation as an abbreviation of one, barely a movement to the side. “In denial.”

“I didn’t lose Maggie because of any trouble getting it up for her,” Marty said. “If that’s what you’re thinking. I’d go the rest of my life happily making love to a series of beautiful women. But no, hotshot, you’re not my first. I haven’t been around that block as much as some, haven’t let half the Iron Crusaders get a taste of my dick, but there was somebody. Briefly.”

Rust wiped sweat off his forehead. “Not half the gang, Marty. One guy. One shit-stain of a human being as liable to kill me as look at me, our only relevant fucking tie to Ledoux, and— _fuck you_ , man.”

Marty flipped him off, a gesture so meaninglessly casual that Rust didn’t know what to make of it.

Then Marty said, “Treadmill. The way you’re looking, and you wearing those gloves, you’re gonna take a swing at me. You want to, go ahead. You don’t, you might want to run a while.”

“I’ll run,” Rust said. He almost spat the words at Marty. Peeled off the gloves and got on the treadmill. He felt incongruous, not a fitting part of the world, in Crash’s stained T-shirt and faded jeans, not clothes for running. But Crash was as well-equipped as he was to go nowhere. He started up the machine and cranked up the speed and incline.

“Don’t kill yourself just because I’m an asshole,” Marty said.

Rust didn’t know if that was supposed to be an apology or not. He figured it for Marty’s approximation of one.

He kept on running until the world edged black around the corners of his vision and Marty said, “ _Dammit_ , Rust,” and slowed the belt down degree by degree until it was barely a crawl. Rust steadied, walking along at one mile an hour, feeling like a glacier moving over the surface of the world. He couldn’t feel the coke anymore and he missed it sharply. It occurred to him to find it funny that they had left two keys of coke scattered across CID’s head detective’s kitchen island.

He said, “I’m not a good bet. For that kind of thing. You’ve got a house, kids. An ex-wife you actually seem to speak to. You don’t want me in the mix.”

“You’re already in the mix.”

“I’m best as a diversion from your life,” Rust said bluntly. “And you’re best as a shelter from mine. We work decently together. But anything else, Marty, we’d drown out what we’re supposed to be paying attention to. I ain’t my best with distractions. And you’d get tired of me and then who’d you hand me off to? Geraci?”

Marty set his jaw out like he was trying to be John Wayne. “The way you talk, it’s like you think I asked you for a promise ring. I didn’t.”

It was true: Marty had asked him for no commitments. But Marty was invested in commitment. _This is your room, this is your toothbrush, that syrup you like’s in the fridge_. Marty had dinner dates with his ex-wife and daughters and every other weekend, like clockwork, trips to petting zoos and toy stores. Neatly lined up shelf of Disney movies in his entertainment center. Half-expired thickener in his cabinet from a joke his ex had found funny however many years ago. And spaghetti carbonara, meatloaf, vanilla milkshakes. He was the kind of man who said _I like to give a hundred percent_.

“You ever cheat on your wife?” Rust said.

“That’s none of your business.”

“Maybe not.”

Marty’s cheeks had red bars laid across them, more like a cartoon of a blush than a blush in truth, and he wouldn’t meet Rust’s eyes. “I had a little thing. Towards the end. She doesn’t know about it.”

“A little thing with just one person?”

Marty nodded. “Court reporter.”

“You ever think you were in love with her?”

The pink of Marty’s face tasted like cake icing.

Marty said, a little hoarsely, “Yeah.” 

“There you go.” He put his feet to the braces on the sides of the treadmill and turned it off. His legs were hot and rubbery and he felt like he could have reached down and molded them into new shapes entirely. “Love’s an illusion, Marty. But it’s one that illustrates my point. You don’t have half measures. Even when you should. That’s why you went in for one meeting with me when I was on Campbell’s string and now you can’t let go.”

“Maybe I liked your eyes,” Marty said.

“Did you?”

“I thought you looked about like somebody’s mug-shot. Maybe a Hollywood one, but a mug-shot all the same. I wasn’t thinking about your eyes. I don’t know when I started.”

Rust knew when he’d started thinking about Marty’s eyes.

(“I’m going to write a little bathroom book of all these sayings of yours,” Marty said. “ _The human mind is a engine for self-justification_ , says Rust Cohle. _You got any LSD on a strip don’t look like a butterfly tattoo?_ , says Rust Cohle. _We’re all fucked and entropy’s the dildo_ , says Rust. The last one a little ad-libbed, but those first two, Rust, those are direct from the horse’s mouth. I’ll print them all up and people can read them while they’re taking a shit. Here,” abruptly, handing Rust a second Tupperware container, “these are cookies.” And Rust looked at him and it seemed like all the colors of him had tastes and he got overloaded, briefly, between that and the chocolate on his tongue. Fried like an egg on his own synapses.)

“What I’m saying is you’ve got to stop,” Rust said. “There’re the kids. We got to think about the kids and nothing else.”

“You need a something else,” Marty said.

But Rust had never needed generics. He needed Marty, specifically. Everything about him was as distinct as a fingerprint and Rust was the powder that got brushed over it to make its mark felt.

The only way he got through this case, maybe, was with Marty. And Marty didn’t do half measures, but Marty did do failure and had done it before. Rust could not afford to be on the losing side of some wager between Marty’s better and worse natures, not when there was no end-date to the case. If he could guarantee that they would fall apart only after Ledoux and every other maggot picking at the rotten carcass of those two dead children was plucked off and cast out, he would go down on Marty here in the garage. He would get bruises on his knees. And he wanted that. Rust had an honest knowledge of himself.

But he had no guarantee. He ran the risk not just of losing Marty, which he could have stood because he had stood every other loss there was, but losing him too soon, when he needed help only Marty would be willing to give him.

“You’re already my something else,” Rust said. “I need you like this, a while. Anything else, we can shake out later, if there’s a later.”

“You always talk like you’re a day away from dying,” Marty said. He laughed, but the sound of it was scraped hollow and sounded more like Rust’s laugh than his own. He looked like he wanted to kiss Rust again but didn’t. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

He didn’t seem to count himself as an event.

But they slept in separate beds that night, still. Rust had been meaning to go back to the clubhouse but didn’t. He produced the coke the following morning with a story of his mystery woman told as lewdly as he could muster. His mind made parallel connections to Marty and he had full-color dreams.


	10. Chapter 10

“Noose,” Rust said.

He had chosen the word only after ten minutes or so of deliberation and he had done it carefully—picked his own word and not Crash’s—because what he’d taken for small-town inbreeding and criminal stupidity in Ledoux the first time they’d met had really been the thousand-yard stare of a man who fancied himself some devil’s oracle. The words he’d used: _everything disseminates_. He wasn’t interested in Crash. Wasn’t even interested in Ginger and Ginger’s patter, Ginger normally as adept at winning over assholes to Miles’s cause as an Uncle Sam recruiter. But Rust knew those eyes. Every now and then he caught a glimpse of them in his own face. He thought, given the right window, he could persuade Ledoux to find him interesting.

Ledoux looked up. Some Los Angeles haze in his eyes dissipated a little. “The tattoo?”

“We’re all hanged men,” Rust said.

“Some more than others.”

Rust slid into the booth opposite him. “It’s your only ink?”

Ledoux tugged his shirt aside.

“Spiral,” Rust said. “Hurricane?”

“Time,” Ledoux said. “All of time.”

“Not a line.”

“Are you fucking Ginger?” Ledoux said, in the same level, dragged-through-stones voice he’d said everything else, as though it didn’t matter who heard.

The music was loud. No one had heard. Rust slipped forward in the booth, his elbows spread out across the table. “Does that matter to you?”

“Flesh is irrelevant,” Ledoux said.

Rust experienced a flash of irritation like a strobe light. He heard Marty saying, _He sounds like you_ , in a voice so dry it would catch on fire if Rust left it alone in a warm room. A lot of things about Marty were like that.

“Plenty of people don’t agree with you,” Rust said, “so you can bring it up all you like and be proud of your open-mindedness, and then maybe I take you outside and string you up by your heels and let the blood out of your throat like a hog. Yeah, asshole. I can get my hands dirty, too. Let’s see how irrelevant your flesh turns out to be.”

“You weren’t this intense the last time I saw you,” Ledoux said. “Were you really drunk?” He said it in a low, confidential tone, as though inviting Rust to tell him all his secrets.

He was no snake-charmer, though, and Rust had held out against interrogations worse than his: had his head dunked in a bucket of freezing water back in Houston, his lip bloodied against the rim on his way down so that he almost drowned in his own cold-bloodedness. They hadn’t thought he was a cop. They’d thought he was skimming. Ginger had bailed him out at least, his hand on the collar of Rust’s jacket, and that night he had fucked Rust slowly, almost lazily, like Rust was his by rights and so wouldn’t run or balk. Rust had gritted his teeth and let it happen. And he hadn’t told Ginger anything either. His mouth had been stitched shut until Marty, _so there you go_ , Rust thought at Ledoux, _that’s how you get me to talk, if you’ve got the patience for it._

“Enigma wrapped in a fucking mystery,” Rust said. “That’s me.”

“Ginger told you what we did.”

“The six o’clock news told me what you did. Shit like that—even I thought the earth would swallow you up. But here you are. Big as life.” He let his mouth break into a smile, long and strange, Crash’s smile, the one that always felt like some other tongue licking his mouth open. “Twice as ugly. But it’s what’s inside that counts, or so I’ve been told.”

“It’s not what’s inside,” Ledoux said. “It’s what’s outside. Outside our bodies that are just pulp and gristle for the mill. Outside the black shell of the universe.”

Somewhere, Marty was getting a kick out of all that, really laughing it up.

“What’s outside?”

“The king in his court,” Ledoux said. He stood up. He didn’t pay for his drink. 

*

“I got to him,” Rust said.

He hadn’t seen Marty in a while. “I don’t need to come in, I don’t have shit,” he’d said a time or two, when Marty had called him.

And he had insisted, this time, on being in the office, with all that blond paneled wood that tasted like the dirty underside of a Band-Aid and Steve Geraci sweating into the collar of his off-white shirt. He needed the abrasion of that because otherwise his thoughts turned widdershins and could not be straightened. And he needed a direction, a single direction, and he needed that single direction to not be Marty.

“You got to him,” Steve repeated. “Did I miss something? Why do we know what asshole killed the kids but we’re not doing anything about it?”

“He’s a lower brick in the pyramid,” Marty said.

Rust took another drag of smoke. “Supports the apex.”

“Apex, pyramids. Marty, come on, you used to be better than this.”

“If you don’t like the information we’re getting,” Marty said calmly, “you don’t have to stay in the room. But I outrank your ass, Steve, so either stay and say something useful or get out.”

“He’s touchy in the mornings,” Rust said.

Marty flipped him off again and this time Rust shot him the bird back. The muscles in his hands felt keyed-up, eager for something: sex or violence. The human body was wired for only so many courses of action. Self-destruction or self-replication. Not that he and Marty could breed, more to the benefit of it. He shook his head and threw the thought off as though it would cling if it he let it stay too long.

“He’s got language tics, cultish, philosophical, says flesh is irrelevant and the universe is a black shell. So I ask what’s outside it. And he tells me there’s a king and a court. You ever heard of anything like that?”

“Have I ever heard of a monarchy?” Marty said.

Steve laughed and Rust’s whole body coiled towards him like a fist. All he wanted to do was come across the table and rip Steve apart.

 _He acts like he owns you_ , he thought in Marty’s direction. _He acts like he deserves you._ Those were not the same thing.

He needed something to keep him focused. The coke he’d cut at Marty’s had only gone so far. He’d burned through it and passed it around discreetly whenever he didn’t have it himself: inculcated goodwill where he could, or at least the absence of malignity. Ginger had taken a gram but still wasn’t talking to him and sometimes watched him from the end of long hallways. Rust was ready, all the time, to feel the barrel of a gun against the top knot of his spine; he would have welcomed it if he didn’t have the children to think of.

Though Marty would see to that, if need be. He’d know that was the entirety of Rust’s last will and testament.

“Have you heard anybody going around talking about a king,” Rust said flatly.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing,” Steve said, like Rust gave a shit about his input.

“He’ll come back and say more anyway,” Rust said.

“Yeah,” Marty said. “In my experience, guys who like to say weird philosophical shit keep coming back to say more of it.” He cleared his throat. “You want lunch?”

Rust shook his head.

*

He met Ledoux again.

This time Rust hung against the bar and let Ledoux come to him. He bought Rust a drink that tasted like honey and fire and before he gave it to him, he pricked the ball of his thumb and squeezed out a drop of blood into the bottom. It floated down, an ethereal red tendril. “Don’t worry,” Ledoux said. “I’m as clean as anyone in this world. Consider it a promise. Or don’t drink.”

“Man,” Rust said in Crash’s voice, “you’re fucked in the head.” He downed the glass in two swallows. The blood wasn’t noticeable; the honey was. “The places I put my dick, the shit I put in my arm, you think I’m scared of you?” He slid the glass across the length of the bar and overshot, purposely, to watch it fall on the floor and break. An indication, if Ledoux was looking for a further one, that Crash was a legitimate shithead.

“I want to know what’s in it for you. Why you’d drink another man’s blood like it was seltzer.”

“Maybe I just don’t give a shit.”

“Maybe,” Ledoux said, but he sounded unconvinced. “Ginger, he’s a criminal in a line of criminals. Put him in a room with his cohorts, your Iron Crusaders, and he loses definition, blurs at the edges. He’ll die, but not before he’s outlived his usefulness. The only time he’s ever been interesting was out of desperation—Miles told him to pay me, so he paid me. That I didn’t ask for money confuses him. What I asked for, that particular currency, it was too original, too far from his limitations, for him to have paid it before. He was temporarily outside of the world, outside of himself, standing in Carcosa.”

Rust memorized the word.

“Now he’s trapped within himself again. He experienced transcendence and utter degradation and he took away from it that it was the price for my help with his crystal, with his LSD. What would you take away from it, Crash? What’s your real name?”

He slipped the last question in almost like a snake darting from the ivy and Rust almost said.

“I ain’t stripping or selling my ass,” Rust said. “I’m not flattered you’d see me like a person.”

“I’m not trying to flatter you. Names are important, for now.”

“Now?”

“One day nothing will be important,” Ledoux said.

“My name’s Steve,” Rust said.

 _You’re such an asshole_ , Marty said to him. _You could have used my name._

But he wouldn’t have said that in this place.

He said, “I haven’t seen Tanya in a while.”

“Tanya?”

“The bartender. Every time I’ve been here with you, place is desolate.”

“I tend bar here now,” Ledoux said. “Erratically.”

“Why? You must have money coming out of your asshole with Ginger’s contract.”

“I’m interested in watching your development, Steve,” Ledoux said. He stood up. “And Tanya hasn’t been feeling well lately.” He took the leather cord necklace out from underneath his shirt and Rust looked at the knot of hair hanging from it. It looked Celtic, like it would have a name, like Ledoux had fashioned it carefully. “Maybe you should come by and see her in a few days.”

“Yeah,” Rust said. His throat felt like a pinhole. “Chicken soup and a good fucking, that’s what she needs.”

“One of the two.”

Ledoux moved behind the bar and Rust saw it, all at once, how he flattened his palms against the polished dark gleam of the wood and spread his arms out like he owned it all.

Maybe he did, now. Ginger had owned a share—Ginger’s most pathetic, most oddly human affectation was his belief that he could work strangely around the edges of things, own slums and dive bars, make something of the shit mountain that was otherwise his life—and for all Rust knew he’d traded it to Ledoux in the heat of some unreal moment. Said, _I won’t_ , about something with the eight year-old girl, the nine year-old boy, and bartered control for it. Marty no doubt would have something to say about that. Would have thought it mattered. Rust didn’t. What mattered was whether or not Ledoux owned any part of where Rust had a drink or where he lay his head.

The black shell of Ledoux’s universe, like it was the ceiling and the walls, pressed in on him.

“Don’t come back here for a few days,” Ledoux said. “When you do, bring something. And we’ll a pay a little visit to Tanya.”

“What should I bring?”

“Whatever you think you want to tell me,” Ledoux said, “about who you are. Put it in a box. Then we’ll see if you’re Ginger or someone else.”


	11. Chapter 11

He drove to Marty’s at about eighty miles an hour the whole way, the lights furious golden bars and kaleidoscopic fractures of color against the windows like smudged handprints, an overload that made him swerve between lanes. It was two in the morning. Crash kept a vampire’s hours because Ledoux, his body held together by acid and false revelations, never slept. Marty was a person, would be sleeping like a person. Rust couldn’t hold a thought together in his head. Flashback? Flashback, he decided.

He ran the truck into a tree at the head of Marty’s neighborhood, an innocent and sappy pine, and split his forehead on the steering wheel, blinked blood into his eyes, everything in stuttered flashes like somebody was taking pictures. Looked: nobody was taking pictures. He flung blood off his face into the passenger seat. The tree was dead but the truck could be pulled out again, its hood busted up, and pointed back on the road.

Rust thought, _I’m going to kill someone_. Even with the flat black velvet of nowhere suburbia, even with all the traffic behind him, he became, for the few minutes it took for him to get to Marty’s house, obsessed with the idea that he would turn some whiplash corner, find a long driveway, and at the end of it, his daughter, and find her only in a collision course. Sophia’s hair, so blonde it was almost white, caught up in the broken plastic of his headlights. He turned his head and gagged into the blood passenger seat, spat up a few strings of bile, mead and whiskey and water and Reggie Ledoux’s blood.

His head was coming apart. He half-fell out of the car and dragged himself to the door, which kept expanding and contracting like the pupil of some monster’s eye.

He hammered into it. “Marty, Marty, Marty.”

Put his mouth against the door. In the dark all the colors were tasteless, he needed taste, needed something other than the echo of that fucking drink. Marty’s door tasted like paint and dust.

“Marty,” he said again.

Marty opened the door. He was wearing an old white T-shirt, thinned at the shoulders, and blue pajama pants with a drawstring that Rust could have gotten undone if he’d felt the need to.

“Rust.” He dug a knuckle against his eye. “You’re bleeding.” He touched Rust at the shoulder and the elbow and then right at the cut, really got his fingers in there, and Rust shied back, because he’d had Ledoux’s blood in him and he was a vampire, kept those hours, couldn’t do it to Marty, Marty who was his only thing. “You okay there, Rust? You hear me okay? Come inside, man, just come inside, you got to sit down, I got to get you something for your head, shit, you need an ambulance?”

That was the one thing he was sure of—that he couldn’t suffer through all those hands. He carved the words out of his tongue like it was stone. “No. Hit a tree.”

“Yeah? It just jump out at you or something?”

Marty came back from the kitchen with a wad of paper towels in his hand and pressed the clutch of them unceremoniously against Rust’s forehead.

“I know you get all hissy-fit about it, but I got to ask if you’re in your head right now.”

“Flashback,” Rust said.

“This,” Marty said, “is not a fucking _flashback_. Shit, Rust. You smell like puke and you’re covered in blood.”

Head wounds bled a lot, something Marty must have known, but it didn’t seem to negate his fussing any.

“I see things, sometimes, colors, lights.”

“You taste colors.”

“Different,” Rust said. “Not crossed synapses, whole-field incursions of some foreign chemical. But,” and he breathed in, watching the living room turn milky as a cataract around him, and out, watching it flush into color, “this is more real. That fucking drink.”

“Someone drugged you?” Marty’s voice hardened, like there was something he could do about it: the futile anger of the righteous, Rust thought. “Ledoux?”

Rust nodded.

“I got to get you help.”

“He doesn’t want me dead,” Rust said.

“Yeah, okay, but people in cults putting shit in drinks don’t have a real long history of not _getting_ people dead, so we’re doing something. You threw up, shit’s all over your arm, so that’s good, that’s good, but we’re doing something.”

“Hospital’s too risky,” Rust said. He kept watching Marty pull his hands through that corn-colored hair of his until it stood up tall and straight, like Rust had shocked him, like he was a bolt of electricity. Rust’s mouth ached from not kissing him. He thought, _I spend too much time not putting my mouth on you, Marty_ , and maybe he said it, because all of a sudden he could see more white around Marty’s eyes.

“Hospital’s risky.”

“Yeah,” Marty said, still looking at him. “You said that.” He made some gesture, moving his head to the side sharply, and Rust recognized it as his own, his habit of tossing away a thought that would kill him, and wondered how it had gotten under Marty’s skin. “I know what to do. I’d say you won’t like it, but you’ll probably like it a hell of a lot better than I will. Are you going to stay put if I go make a phone call?”

Rust considered it and nodded. He said, “Suck you off, if you want.”

“I can’t handle this shit right now,” Marty announced, seemingly to nobody, since it wasn’t to Rust, and he went off for a couple of minutes. He came back with a distinctly pinched expression on his face, like he was trying to stave off a migraine. “All right. Maggie’s going to patch you up. You’re gonna not say anything about sucking me off.”

“Offer still stands and I can do it before we go.” He looked at Marty. “You’re hard enough, wouldn’t take long.”

“You get high and you’re a fucking cocktease. In the morning, you’re gonna be glad I didn’t take advantage.”

“With me, there’s never any morning,” Rust said.

“And then I get glad when you talk like that, because that’s normal, for you. Come on, queer Nietzsche, let’s pour you in a car.”

 _You are, though_ , Rust thought, as he let Marty lift him up and maneuver him outside again, into the shock of the balmy air. _You are hard enough I could finish you quick_. It had been a long time since someone had thought the crooked angles inside his skull had disqualified him from anything. His skin was still warm. That was all most people needed.

Marty drove him to the kind of house that would have been described as _pleasant_ in some real estate handbook.

Rust could see him living in it, but he couldn’t see him fitting in it. “You’re not a pleasant person.”

“Yeah,” Marty said. He was still wearing his pajama pants, Rust didn’t know why he hadn’t noticed that before. “I think I’ll go ahead and pass on getting people skills from you, Rust.”

“You’re not hard anymore,” Rust said.

“You’re a font of useful observations. The night is not conducive, Rust, so shut the fuck up.”

Rust shut up. He followed Marty up to the house.

Marty knocked, kind of a pussy knock, two beats as light as air, and a woman—angry, strawberry accents to her face, dark hair pulled back so tight her scalp was white at the edges, but recognizable all the same as the woman in the background of some of Marty’s photos—yanked it open immediately. “You’ve got a key, Marty,” she said. “You’ve got a key and you called and it’s three in the morning so you _walk in_ , you don’t _knock_ and wake the girls up.” She said all this lowly, furiously, like she wanted to skin them but didn’t have the knife for it so words would have to do.

“It’s a one-time thing, Mags,” Marty said, in a whisper equally low but not as pissed. “He’s all fucked-up, look at me. Somebody slipped him something and he can’t go to the ER, he’s undercover.”

“He’s undercover as someone who can’t go to a fucking emergency room?”

“Risky,” Rust said.

Marty turned to him. “So help me, Rust, the word ‘risky’ comes out of your mouth one more time tonight, I will—”

“ _Would the two of you just get inside_ ,” Maggie said through her teeth.

They got inside.

Maggie led him to a kitchen chair and snapped on a pair of latex gloves. “Head wound’s not bad,” she said, her tone dispassionate. “They always bleed a lot. How’d you get it?”

“Tree,” Rust said. Thoughts swam through him like a school of fish. “I appreciate you doing this, ma’am.”

“Maggie.”

“Maggie. We’re sorry about waking you up.”

“That’s a big deal for him, the apologizing thing,” Marty said. His hip was against the counter and he’d found a bag of Pepperidge Farm cookies in the cabinet and was munching through them slowly, his hand down in the white package like a bear rooting around for honey. He seemed to have forgotten how tentatively he’d knocked and made himself right at home. Maybe Rust had been wrong and he fit here after all and it was only with Rust that he was distorted, the liminal point between ordinary things—meatloaf, steady jobs—and Rust himself. “He didn’t apologize for waking _me_ up.”

“I’ll take it to heart,” Maggie said. She shone a penlight in his eyes. “Dilation’s off.”

“Tanya,” Rust said.

“Maggie.”

“No, Ledoux, he’s got Tanya, that’s why I left, why I had to wake up Marty.” He’d been panning through his mind, a worker down in the muddy waters of some stream, running water across metal looking for gold, trying to remember, to fixate on some shine of a thought, and there it was: why he had driven so fast and come so late. “Tanya, the bartender, Ledoux has her, he’s wearing her hair like a charm on that fucking necklace of his. He wants Crash to make some kind of buy-in, give him a gift, and then maybe he’ll let him see her.”

“He think you’re in love with her?”

“I think he thinks I want to kill her,” Rust said bluntly. “He knows about Ginger. Tanya’s not fond of Crash, they’ve had words.”

“He’s Crash,” Marty said to Maggie. “He’s got kind of a split-personality thing about it, though.” His voice was cotton-candy light, but his eyes belied him: _head detective_ , Rust thought, with a kind of fierce pride, as though he’d boosted Marty into that position himself. “Open Road bartender. You think she’s still alive?”

“Yeah.” He let Maggie tape the butterfly bandage on him: it wouldn’t last long, not if he had people to see, but he appreciated the thought and the proficiency of it. “I don’t know that she wants to be.”

“When’s Ledoux want you back?”

“Few days.”

“Bearing gifts.”

“Trojan Horse the motherfucker,” Rust said.

“He thinks you want to kill her?” Maggie said.

“Sorry, honey,” Marty said. “Didn’t mean to drag in all this shop-talk.”

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, Marty, you brought in some high-out-of-his-skull undercover biker with a gushing head-wound but it’s the conversation that’s the problem.” She sat down, put her hand on Rust’s wrist, counted out his pulse, and seemed satisfied with it. “If he thinks you want to kill her, he must think it’s personal, I mean, you _specifically_ wanting to kill her. You should bring him something of hers.”

“I don’t have anything of hers.”

“You can have something of mine.”

Marty straightened up. “No, he fucking can’t.”

“It’s my decision,” she said. “You’re not the only one who sees life-or-death situations, Marty.”

“Dammit, Maggie—”

“You’re both wrong,” Rust said.

They turned to look at him and it was the first time since he’d came into the house that he could see where they used to be married, where the edge of their two puzzle pieces used to be shaped to snap together, because the way they looked when they were pissed at him was just about the same.

“You’re thinking about him like he’s like you.”

“We’re thinking about him like he’s _psychotic_ , Rust,” Marty said, with a thin veneer of exaggerated patience laid over his voice. “Like he’s kidnapped a woman and is going to kill her and we’re trying to think of what you should give him for Christmas.”

“He wants proof I think outside the lines,” Rust said. “I bring him her panties, or a scarf—that’s what you were thinking, wasn’t it?—all it does is tell him I’m one more news story. Crash, he’d do that, but he’s got to change, he’s got to be more like me. I’m the one Ledoux wants, even if he doesn’t know it. I have to get inside my own head.”

“I wouldn’t, if I were you,” Marty said, but he went back to the cookies and offered Rust one. “How’s your head?”

“My thoughts are connecting back up again. Memory’s still fuzzy.”

“You’re coming out of it quick,” Maggie said. “Marty said you were hallucinating.”

“Lights and colors, mostly. I’m still disorganized—drawers are there, but they’re pulled out, contents all over the floor.” He licked his lips. “My mouth’s dry.”

Marty went to the sink and came back with a glass of tap-water. Rust’s hand didn’t seem coordinate enough to take it right away—his fine motor skills gone sluggish and unresponsive—so Marty opened up his hand, stuck the glass in, tested Rust’s grip, and backed off, seemingly satisfied. Rust drank. He saw Maggie through the bottom of the glass, her eyes on him, her eyes going to Marty. A little V formed between her eyebrows.

“I didn’t drug that,” Marty said.

“Didn’t put your blood in it, either,” Rust said. He hadn’t planned on telling them that.

He guessed it would forestall any immediate kissing, anyway, because Marty pulled a face like he was going to spit even the idea of Ledoux’s blood out of his mouth. “He put his blood in it?”

“A drop. What I meant about him not being ordinary.”

“Yeah, no shit.”

“If whoever drugged you makes LSD—” Maggie checked with Marty, who nodded. “—Then he’s probably got the skills to make a variation on a theme. We see designer drugs sometimes in the ER. Looks like you got something short-lived, hallucinogenic, with a cluster of side-effects. Your nausea, disorientation. My best guess is it will pass. We’ve seen things like it before. Your pulse and temp are both normal. Keep drinking. I can give you an emetic, but if you’ve already thrown up, you’ve probably already gotten most of it out of your system. The water will help. You should sleep over at Marty’s and he’ll keep an eye on you.”

“Can I see the girls before I go?” Marty said.

Maggie nodded. “Don’t wake them up.”

Marty kissed her on the cheek, which she accepted with a slight bump of her jawline in his direction, half-offering, half-weariness, and then he disappeared down the hall. She turned to Rust. Her right foot moved restlessly against the kitchen floor.

“You like Marty’s cooking?” she said.

Rust smiled. “More or less.”

She nodded a few times, like he had told her more than he’d thought.

When Marty came back, Rust could hardly stand to look at him, at the peace that radiated off him like sunlight. He slid out of his chair and found some unsteady position on his feet. “Let’s go. I want everything anybody can find out about Ledoux, anything. Birthstone color. And I want proof Tanya’s gone, don’t want to just take his word for it.”

“Marty,” Maggie said.

Marty said, “I’ll let you know.”


	12. Chapter 12

When they were back in the car, Rust said, “That wasn’t what she was going to say. It was the right thing for you to say. Moral thing. But it wasn’t what she was going to ask from you.”

“What was it, then? Fifteen minutes and you know the woman like the back of your hand.”

“Something about me, I think. She asked me how I liked your cooking.”

Marty sighed. “Fuck.” He reached over and found Rust’s hand in the dark and that was the most surprising moment of it, of the whole evening, that pressure of Marty’s fingers against his with the ghost of the grapefruit-pink sun coming over the horizon. “She was going to find out. I think she knew already, anyway. There was a whole thing a couple years back about some porn mags she found in the garage. One or two of them weren’t like the others. I don’t even remember what I told her, something like I bought them in bulk and they must have slipped in. She didn’t believe me. Mostly because I was full of shit.”

“She loves you,” Rust said.

“Yeah, she loves me. I love her, too. But we’ve never been easy on each other. Anyhow, she always has her shit together, she needs somebody like that.”

“What do you need?”

“I need,” Marty said, “for you to not drink people’s blood and roofies and show up at my house.” He kept on driving one-handed. It seemed easy for him. “I need you to get this Ledoux thing locked up as quick as you can so I can bail your ass out of this _fucking_ undercover job.”

“There’s no out, Marty,” he said. “They’re never going to let me go.”

“They haven’t had me to deal with yet,” Marty said, utterly confident. “They’ve just had you. And you ain’t scary, Rust. Not in the right way, anyhow.”

He pulled into his driveway and parked.

“Hasn’t been all bad,” Rust said. “Not at the end.”

“All right,” Marty said. “I’m gonna do this, and we’re both going to not think about you having some guy’s blood in your mouth earlier.” He leaned over and kissed Rust, nice and slow, his hand on Rust’s jaw. When they pulled apart, he said, “You better have meant me, asshole.”

“I meant you,” Rust said.

“And I’ve been thinking about what you should give Ledoux.”

“You’re lucky I’ve got low expectations for pillow-talk.”

“The boy and the girl means he likes matched pairs. He thinks there’s something about you and this bartender. Is there?”

“Nothing more than her hating me.”

“But Ledoux, he thinks there’s something there, something more. That you’d be glad to see her dead, more than you’d be glad about seeing somebody else dead.” He rubbed a hand across his face. “I don’t like having this conversation like this, like you’re him. Crash. And now you’ve got me doing it, acting like you’re two different people. Point is, he wants a matched set, and who else is he going to think you want dead?”

“You’re saying Ginger? Give him Ginger?”

Marty shook his head. “A cop. I’m saying a cop. Give him me.”

Rust opened the door and stumbled out onto the grass of Marty’s lawn.

“Fuck you, Marty. No way in hell. I can’t give him your ex-wife’s _necklace_ or whatever the fuck she was going to give me but I can give him you?” He pointed at him. The sunrise was setting Marty on fire and he was all different shades of orange that tasted sweet, heavy, corn syrupy on Rust’s tongue, and his stomach heaved like he was going to throw up again. He leaned against the car. “You and him—you don’t go in the same room. Not in the same space. I bring him in, I don’t even want you on the opposite side of the fucking table.”

“You’re not being rational about this,” Marty said. He sounded surprised, like he’d expected Rust to be able to kiss him and then serve him to Ledoux without batting an eye.

“Fuck you,” Rust said again. “I don’t need you. I don’t need this. You didn’t want me when you could have had me, _three_ times, fucking _three times_ I said I’d fuck you, or I drew you that fucking picture that said the same thing and it’s a joke to you, or I’m high.”

“You think I run away from you?” Marty said. “You think _I’m_ the one—”

“—You don’t want me, you want somebody more fucked up than you so you feel better. You want an excuse to be a fucking hero.”

“You ditch every single fucking thing when it doesn’t go the way you want. Shit, you probably go back to bed when you don’t like the sky’s shade of blue. ‘That tastes wrong, fuck it.’ The Rust Cohle story. I didn’t fawn over your sketch but I _kept the fucking thing_ , Rust. And because I don’t _assault_ you whenever you get high and get it in your head that now’s the fucking time, you think, oh, I’m looking to marry your ass, so you better back off and make things casual. Every fucking time with you. Everything. Campbell was right. Did it ever occur to you that when I say to give me to Ledoux, I’m not doing it for _you_? I’m not trying to save you, Rust. There’s _other people_ in the world.”

He steadied himself, drew in a breath. He was the second most beautiful thing Rust had ever seen, lit up from behind by the sun, haloed by it, like some fourteenth-century picture of a saint.

“Not in love with you, Rust,” Marty said. “Half the time I don’t even like you. So listen to what I say when I say it. It’s not about you.”

Rust had told Marty love was an illusion and Marty, who was on some basic level kind, had not tried to prove him a liar by bring up Sophia. But if he had, Rust would have told him what he knew to be his central truth: that he must not have loved her enough. Because if he had, he would have known, somehow, to stop her death from happening. Orpheus descending into hell. If love offered no prevention, no power, then it was a baroque artifact of the human imagination. And he had not saved her.

He stood there, breathing in and out shallowly. Took his pulse. He understood, or tried to understood, that he would not save Marty.

“I can’t wake up every morning owing her,” Rust said. “So fine. We’ll do it your way. But after that, we’re done. I’ll work with Geraci or whoever else you want to trade me to. But not you.”

“Guess the end’s bad after all,” Marty said.

Except he smiled a little and turned his head and Rust saw the light glint off his eyes.

When he’d left, Claire said, _You can’t lose anything without losing everything, Rust. You think that makes you a realist. You’re a fucking coward._

Rust said, “You really kept the sketch?”

Marty looked over at him. Rust hadn’t imagined it: that dampness underneath his eyes. He didn’t think Marty knew about it. “Yeah.”

“Come on,” Rust said. “Let’s go inside.”

*

Rust threw himself at Marty the second he closed the door. His whole body pressed against Marty’s, stuck to him at the mouth, moving furiously, gracelessly, without technique, like his object wasn’t to fuck Marty but to erase the barriers between them. Marty pushed back just as hard, not trying to buck Rust off, but trying to disappear into him, too. Rust moved his mouth down on Marty’s neck and sucked until Marty moaned.

“Vampire,” Marty said.

“Shut up.” Rust tugged Marty’s shirt off over his head and Marty did the same for him. They moved back into the living room, hands on each other. Marty’s nipples didn’t seem to do much for him, but he lost it when Rust dragged a hand down his spine.

“Couch,” Marty said.

Rust shook his head. “I don’t know. Bed or floor. I want more room.”

“Then floor,” Marty said.

Rust smiled. “You like it. You want rug burns, Marty? On your knees or mine?”

“We’ve got time to make it both.”

“So you don’t back out this time, let me go ahead and say that I have my head as straight as it gets. Fried synapses are still fried, but this is as whole as I get.” He butted his head against Marty’s neck in what he couldn’t say, truthfully, wasn’t a nuzzle. “I need you, man. But we’ve got to be smart about this. I can’t go straight from fucking Ginger to fucking you. I don’t even know that I’m clean.”

“I’ve got condoms. Live in hope.”

“I want to suck you off,” Rust said. “Did earlier, do now. Those fucking blue pajama pants, that knot’s been in my head all night. Sitting there with your ex trying to fix my cut, feel my pulse, and all I’m thinking about’s that drawstring. I told you—can’t compartmentalize around you. Everything else I should be worrying about, and I make it that.” He knelt down and picked at it and then gave up and just rolled the pants down over Marty’s hips. Boxers, too. He wet his mouth and Marty gripped his shoulders.

“Damn, Rust,” Marty said. “I thought it was just ‘cause you were high.”

Rust looked up at him. “I always talk too much, Marty. This gives my mouth something else to do. Oral fixation.”

“Yeah. Stop philosophizing and blow me.”

Rust took him in as deep as he could. Marty made small gratifying sounds, said Rust’s names few times. He was hot in Rust’s mouth, hot and silky, and Rust liked the taste of him, the early salt from the head of his cock, liked the freedom to not talk, to have all his ideas and all that _philosophizing_ cut down to this. He liked this, wasn’t lying about that, had always liked giving head even more than he’d liked being fucked, but Marty, it seemed liked getting it, getting it every which way, because his fingers only tightened on Rust, moved up to his hair, and he said, “Damn, Rust, fingers, please,” and Rust didn’t have any lube, which Marty must have known, so he took himself off Marty’s cock for a minute to slurp on his fingers.

Marty watched him with a look on his face that Rust wished he had the time to draw. He looked like Rust was a dream he was having and he didn’t want to wake up.

“You’re so hot,” Marty said, and Rust almost laughed, wanted to, pressed his face against Marty’s groin again and licked him, hard, so he wouldn’t, because it was like Marty had learned his lines from porn. “So fucking hot, Rust, the sexiest thing,” and Rust put his lips around just the head of Marty’s cock, flicked his tongue against the slit, and at the same time moved a finger to Marty’s ass and nudged it in.

And Marty was still talking, but he didn’t sound like a movie anymore.

“Rust, oh, fuck, Rust, never stopped thinking about you, never even fucking wanted to.” He hit a tangle in Rust’s hair and tugged at it and Rust liked that, liked the burn in his scalp. “Jerked off to thinking about fucking you in that stupid leather jacket with the scorpion but you, Rust, you, it was always gonna be you. I lied, baby. Like you a whole hell of a lot, all the time, can’t get enough of you. Your fucking mouth—if I’d known you could do this—”

Rust added another finger and Marty came. Rust swallowed him down like he was hungry for it, but kept himself in Marty a minute or so longer, unwilling to give that up, the look on Marty’s face.

“I’ve got you,” Marty said. “My turn, Rust. I know what I’m doing. Quick study, anyway, and I figure I’ve got the basics down. Like knowing Spanish gets you Italian.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” He nudged Marty’s shoulder. “I said you got to be careful.”

“Trust me, I’m not interested in picking up whatever Ginger could have put down on you. And it’s fucked up you’re thinking about that and you’re still hard as a rock.” He touched Rust’s cock experimentally and Rust’s hips rose up, which seemed to delight him. “I’ll take care of you and I’ll take care of me, okay? Nothing you’re going to have to worry your pretty little head about.”

“Pretty little—oh, _fuck_ , Marty, _fuck_ —” because Marty had put his mouth between Rust’s legs, but lower than he’d expected, tongue and lips against Rust’s ass and Rust got too distracted by it to mind shoving up into that touch. He felt his head expand into disorganized galaxies. “You do this for everybody?”

“I’m generous,” Marty said, and after another minute or two, he moved up.

“I’m not gonna last,” Rust said.

“I don’t need you to last,” Marty said. “I don’t know that’s a virtue in this kind of situation.” He ran his tongue along the length of Rust’s cock almost experimentally and, apparently having decided he liked it fine, wrapped his mouth around it. Rust wanted to laugh at the expression on his face and then a second later didn’t want to laugh at all.

He lasted maybe a minute, minute-and-a-half. Marty didn’t swallow—Rust reckoned it for an acquired taste—but other than that there didn’t seem to be anything he minded. He fitted himself up happily enough underneath Rust’s arm, his head on Rust’s shoulder. “I think I did all right.”

“You want praise?”

“Wouldn’t hurt.”

Rust drew a thumb along Marty’s jawline. “Better than fine. I’d say the best I’ve had in recent memory, but that’d be an insult to you, considering.” He felt Marty’s muscles tense. “It wasn’t any kind of thing, Marty, with Ginger. It was what had to happen. What was best for the job.”

“You think I think you want to sleep with him?” Marty said. “You _hate_ him, Rust. I’ve heard you talk about him—nothing but contempt. Understandable, given what he’s done. But I’m thinking it predates that, goes back to what he did to you, to you not being able to say he couldn’t. Your fucking job.” He seemed to develop an interest in Rust’s hipbone and explored that for a while, not teasing him but just petting him, like he had nothing else in the world to do but memorize the way Rust’s skin felt underneath his. “I’ll get you out of it.”

“You always want to be a hero.”

“I always want to be _your_ hero,” Marty said.

That startled a laugh out of him.

“Too much?”

“You’ve already got me in bed,” Rust said. “Figuratively speaking. I’d think you could drop the pick-up lines.” Though there was, again, that vanilla streak to Marty, despite his shading: that he could hand out an enthusiastic, practiced rimjob and a wholehearted-but-amateurish blowjob proved the shades, that he liked Rust at all proved them, but still, despite that, he liked cookouts and beer and cried at _Shawshank Redemption_. Rust didn’t know the type except by reputation. Men like that had never had any time for him, before Marty.

“Then we’ll talk serious,” Marty said, without a change in tone. “You gonna bitch any more about the plan?”

“No,” Rust said, because despite what Marty must have thought of him, he didn’t see any point to being Sisyphus, lugging his burden uphill when it would only tumble down again. He’d agreed and that was the end of it. “But I’m wondering about speeding up the timeline. I’ve got reason to believe she’s alive and will stay that way until I bring you to Ledoux, but when I try to think of why he’d be leaving her alone, not torturing her, not troubling her, I come up blank. I don’t think he’d do permanent damage before I got there, not if he’s intending her as a gift, but I can’t justify waiting on it, putting it all on his timeline, on that kind of hunch. Not letting her go through whatever she’s going through until then. But that doesn’t mean I can speed it up much, either. He told me to wait and he’s sharp enough when he’s not high out of his mind, he’ll twig if something’s wrong, if I rush.”

“There’s no afterglow with you,” Marty said grumpily, like he hadn’t been the one who’d brought it up. “Can you shorten it by a day? Bring me in—say that’s why there’s a rush on it. You’ve got a cop on a string, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

“Could work.”

“I’ve got to tell Steve, you know that. Got to have backup if we’re both going in together.”

“You could tell Campbell.”

“Campbell wouldn’t piss on me if I was on fire these days. Steve likes me even if he hates your guts.”

“Wouldn’t like you if he knew you had my dick in your mouth.”

“Well,” Marty said, “I don’t plan on telling him that.” He shifted. “That comes up, we’ll cross the bridge or burn it, whatever we need to do. For now I got no problem keeping secrets unless you’ve got a problem being one.”

Rust shrugged. Marty was the only person he told everything to anyway and even to Marty he sometimes felt like a deck of cards shuffled and reshuffled, sometimes face-up, sometimes face-down, suits appearing and disappearing like clockwork. He was not used to disclosure. He wouldn’t have given a fuck if Steve knew or not aside from wanting Steve know that whatever he thought, Rust was the one who had the better claim on Marty. The upper hand. Besides, the kind of man Marty wanted to be, wanted other people to think he was, might have been compatible with being with Rust, but it wasn’t compatible with other people knowing it. But Marty wouldn’t like him saying that.

“Fine,” Rust said. “But you can’t trust Geraci. He’s not going to go out on a limb for you with this. You tell him, you’d better make sure you can make it sound official, and that means telling more people, and we don’t know how high up this goes. So I say no.”

“ _How high up this thing goes_. You sound like Nicholson in _Chinatown_.”

“Never saw it.”

“’Course you didn’t.” He resumed stroking Rust’s hipbone. “You gave in on taking me. I’ll give in on Steve. But we write this whole thing down and we give it to Maggie.”

Two days. He had two days before he turned Marty over to Ledoux and lost whatever chance he’d had of following the conspiracy ladder any further up. The shit they were about to stir up, taking this kind of chance, someone would pull him and have him buried alive in Miami, working over the cartels, until the line between him and Crash disappeared forever and he forgot himself. And Marty. Two days.

Marty was smart enough to know his share of the risk, but he was protected, insulated by likability and that stupid fucking implacable charm of his, so he didn’t know what happened to men on the job who lacked that, who moved like Rust did, like they were all made of knives and torn-apart pairs of scissors, who disagreed, who made trouble not just once but always. Marty might get a transfer or a demotion, and he knew that, but he was too innocent, in his way, to know what Rust would get.

He didn’t know how short their time was.

“We can write it up,” Rust said. “But I’m not going back.” Once they moved him, he’d torch the Iron Crusaders without looking back, and he had enough fuel to light the fire and enough dirt to bury them already, he didn’t need more, didn’t need forty-eight hours of it. And it kept him away from Ginger and the ghost town of the bar he wasn’t supposed to be seen in anyway. “I’ll stay here, or if you don’t want me here, I’ll get a hotel.”

“I want you here,” Marty said quickly.

Like there had only ever been one answer to that or any other question.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updates will be coming much faster now--it's all completed and edited. Thanks so much for your patience during the longer waits. You are all amazing.

**PART FOUR**

 

“Are you sure about this?”

It was the second time Rust had asked him that. He’d been meant to put the damned duct tape on ten minutes ago but kept finding other things to do. Marty’s lips were starting to burn, anticipatory-like, from waiting. Rust’s skittishness was a compliment he’d love to take if he hadn’t been nervous, too, nervous enough for both of them. He wrapped his hand around Rust’s wrist and took his pulse quickly. The shit you learned from the other person: picking up bits and pieces of them like lint. Rust’s blood beat an urgent tattoo against his fingertips.

“Readier than you,” Marty said.

“Well, since I’m not ready at all for this shit, I don’t think that’s saying much.”

“You put the tape on me. You put me in the trunk.” It was the third or fourth time they had gone through it. “If Ledoux asks—”

“I know my fucking lines, Marty.” He took his hand out from Marty’s grip and turned around. Marty made an effort to appreciate the lines of him but wasn’t up for it.

And anyhow they’d been at it like bunnies in their little reprieve, fucking like someone had set a timer to them and it was all urgent, urgent: stubble and chapped lips and callused hands rasping hard against dicks until Marty had felt red and chafed and had still given it up, and given in to it, time and time again, like Rust was a well he could never drink dry. _Crazy about you_ , Marty had murmured against Rust’s shoulder last night, when he’d put Rust at as close to sleep as Rust seemed to get—a Vaseline-softened blur like an old-time smudge on a lens, Rust boneless and soft, hazy, legs twitching like a dog’s with dreams. _Crazy about you, sugar. You unbelievable fucking asshole._

Which all went to saying that he didn’t appreciate it, exactly, Rust acting like this was harder for him. Marty was the one trussed up like the Thanksgiving Day turkey. Marty was the one who had to let Rust, his fucking boyfriend or whatever, rub elbows with a cultic psychopath while he couldn’t lift a finger to intervene if shit started to go wrong.

Marty was the one who would leave behind kids if it all did go wrong, which wasn’t something he was equipped to say.

“I’m gonna see you on the other side of this,” Marty said. He kissed Rust briefly against Rust’s jawline and then again, first softer and then harder, more desperately, more definitively, on the mouth. “But we’ve only got the one choice to make.”

“I don’t even give a shit about her,” Rust said. “Do you that, Marty? Do you know that really I’m that fucking _hollowed-out_ inside, that I think about not going to her at all?”

“Yeah,” Marty said, “but you’re a good guy. You like that white knight thing. You forget I know that about you. We’ve done this before.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Rust said, and slapped the tape against Marty’s mouth.

Maybe just to make him stop talking. Marty hadn’t known him too long, all things considered, but he’d known him long enough to see that Rust acted like someone had doused him with itching powder whenever he got a compliment. Which Marty couldn’t account for. He liked being the center of Rust’s attention, Rust’s adoration. If Rust had been normal, split between all kinds of different concerns, Marty thought he would have fallen into this whole thing differently, or maybe not at all. Rust had pegged him for it, in one of those late night bed-talks—had said, “You like ‘em crazy.” Maybe so.

“Breathing through your nose okay?”

Marty nodded.

“You pissed about the tape?”

Shook his head.

Rust framed Marty’s face in his hands, those fucking delicate pianist-sketch artist hands, and said, “If he makes a move for you, I’m going to fuck him up. I’ll burn him down. I swear, Marty.” He rested his forehead against Marty’s for a second. He breathed unsteadily. Marty butted his head forward like a goat nuzzling a hand and Rust crooked his head down into Marty’s neck. His breath warm.

“All right,” he said finally, when he took himself away. “Let’s go if we’re going.”

*

He put Marty into the trunk with the efficiency of someone who had done that kind of thing before and once he was in, he taped Marty’s hands and feet together. He’d done that kind of hog-tie before, too. Marty thought of Campbell trying to warn him that Rust was a son of a bitch and knew Campbell probably didn’t know the half of it, couldn’t guess at the amount of blood on Rust’s hands, or the cleverness in them at these kinds of tasks. Fuck Campbell, though. They didn’t all get to shape Rust out of atrocity and fucking heroin and then walk away from what it had made him.

He had promised to get Rust free of all of it. If this went right, there’d be no way Rust couldn’t walk. How much of an asshole did it make him that he was doing this for Rust as much as for the dead kids, the kidnapped woman?

Rust touched him on the temple and then shut him in the dark.

Marty put Rust on inside his head like a record and let him spin, thought: _The strings of my heart are all out of tune._

Thought: _The lightless void of upholstery in the dark is the taste of the dust particles between the stars._

He got annoyed at Rust for that one, which was as good a sport as any. He killed the time that way, lying in the dark with a crick in his neck and his hands sweating into each other, air whistling in and out of his noise in occasional bursts of panic. He created Cohle-isms and pricked them with needles to let out all their air. Eventually it made a kind of trap door inside his head and he disappeared down it into some bottomless place. He didn’t have to worry about breathing, living, saving Rust, abandoning his family. None of that.

He thought, _This whole county smells like gasoline and false prophets, old dynasties gone_ —and the hot sunlight clapped down hard against him like a hand. He blinked and burrowed his head against the bottom of the trunk and then tried to rise, fumblingly, only to have another hand—not the sun’s, this time—cast him back down. Shit. _Knocked_ him back down. He was still half Rust and it would take a stronger sunlight than the one on offer to burn all those shadows away. Marty grinned hard, blood on his teeth from the punch, like, _go on, motherfucker, I’m Hart, I’m Cohle, you want a piece of me?_

“Who the fuck is this?”

It wasn’t Rust’s voice, not even when Rust had his hand up Crash’s ass like a puppeteer, so Marty figured it for Ledoux and waited for his eyes to adjust.

“Motherfucking white knight asshole cop. The one with his nose out for whatever pussy I was after. He arrested one bitch a while back, you remember. I figured if anyone was going to be interested in Tanya, shit, it’d be him.”

“An agent of authority,” Ledoux said. “I asked for a gift and you brought me gift-wrapped police, everything but the apple in his mouth.”

A pig crack. Fucking original. His eyes finally resolved Ledoux into someone unimpressive, typical hick, methhead-crackhead murdering rapist, probably, but put him in a line-up and nine times out of ten he’d walk, indistinguishable from his fellows. Aside from the shirtless thing and the weird-as-shit tattoos.

“You asked,” Rust drawled. “It was dealer’s choice. You don’t want him, we’ve got that jug of gasoline back at the club. I’ll flick matches at him until one hits.”

“No,” Ledoux said. “He’ll more than do. Pairs are symbolic, either spatially or temporally.”

Something flickered across Rust’s face for a second and Marty pegged it as either irritation that Marty had been right about the two-for-one deal Ledoux liked or sheer pissiness at the fact that Ledoux talked even crazier than he did. _I’d kiss that scowl off you._ A cramp tightened in his leg and he bucked, almost clocked his head against the metal ridge.

“Seizure?”

“I think he’s just restless,” Rust said. He carded his fingers briefly into Marty’s hair. “Don’t worry, asshole. We’ll give you shit to think about.”

He turned back to Ledoux. “Where am I taking him?”


	14. Chapter 14

Marty had been to some nothing-places in his time—most drug manufacturing, especially if there was a stink on it, happened in the countryside, well away from civilians who might get a sniff and call the police—but Ledoux’s place was more desolate than he could have imagined. They had to go off-road to get there and then it was just a cluster of buildings, small and misshapen, lying on the ground like pieces of shit, and nothing around but green so dense and overwhelming it might as well have been jungle. The earth there wasn’t red soil but a clayey gray with a shimmer of green against it in oily standing patches. The ground turning sour.

Ledoux and Rust dragged him out of the car and into one of the outbuildings. Marty threw his head back on the way there like he could catch an eyeful of light and keep it.

Up close, Ledoux had an intensity about him Marty hadn’t noticed before. He smelled, too, like he hadn’t bathed in weeks, and there was an overheated feeling coming off his big farmer muscles, like inside he was all whirring machinery close to spinning off its gears. The only time Marty had been near anything like that had been with his father, at the end, when the cancer had soaked through him like water through a sponge and the Alzheimer’s had eaten holes through his mind. A sick kind of craziness. Rust had to be wrong about how much of it there could be in the world, Marty thought, because people made choices, and Ledoux was a choice nobody in their right mind would make.

He underestimated, maybe, how persuasive that kind of madness could be. How easily one could slip into it.

The outbuilding was full of flies.

Marty had never seen so many at once. They were like murder victims dragged from the river: their bodies bloated and muddy. Their green-purple eyes rolling. Their legs rubbing together. They swarmed into piles and crawled over plates, over the ground, over the walls, over Marty. Their feet tracked decay against his skin. He lost it a little, trying to get away from them, and Rust ran his knuckles hard against Marty’s spine, half-comfort, half-warning. Marty’s hair, sweat-matted, fell against his eyes.

_This was a mistake. We made a mistake. We shouldn’t be here, Rust, nobody should be here._

Then he saw the woman. Tanya.

He’d stolen all those hours with Rust at some cost to her—they hadn’t wanted to spook Ledoux, but somewhere down in some metallic, tinfoil part of him, he’d calculated what could happen to her in the meantime, had weighed Rust’s assessment that she wouldn’t die, and counted it as the cost of doing business. She made him want to crawl out of his own skin now. The shame felt like it would lock down his breath in his chest, like maybe he didn’t deserve air.

The thing about having been married was he would always know, in the back of his mind, what Maggie would think of him, at certain moments. In this one, he knew.

Ledoux had nailed Tanya to the table by one hand and the flies had gotten into the blood and were eating it off her palm. She was weeping, snot bubbling at her nose, and they were there for that, too.

She couldn’t have been like that too long—surely to God she would have passed out if she had been—and, some part of Marty was capable, terribly, of noting, there was no pile of shit underneath her to delight the flies even more. No.

She had been somewhere else and Ledoux had moved here and moved her recently, sometime after Rust had made his appearance at the bar. Which meant, Marty realized, that there was at least one other person.

Someone had had to tell Ledoux Rust had shown up for their date.

Great. He’d hope it was a two-person conspiracy just as fucking cozy as his and Rust’s.

All this thinking just to avoid looking at her because she looked a little like Maggie. The image of Maggie the last time he’d seen her, in the kitchen of the old house, slapped against him like cold water.

 _Fucking focus, Marty_ , she would have said.

Rust hauled him forward and pushed him down on the ground next to her. Marty wriggled and found a clear airway, his nose not smashed against the floor or the smell of her sweat. He wanted to tell her, even though that was dumb as shit. Maybe Rust had taped his mouth shut to stop him from playing hero as much as to reassure Ledoux.

Rust kicked him over so that his bound hands were against Tanya’s bare leg. Marty knew him—motherfucker didn’t make mistakes or do things by accident, not when he was in the zone. Marty’s fingers were almost lifeless, but he flexed them a couple of times to get the blood flowing again, and, carefully, backwards, traced _C-O-P_ over and over again against her thigh. She didn’t react at first, probably deadened to any sensation behind the cramps, the pain in her hand, the sweat drenched down her body, the seam of her shorts cutting into her leg. But the tone of her sobs shifted somehow.

She reached out for him. _C-O-P?_ she traced hesitantly, her hand behind his elbow.

Marty squeezed her leg.

She let out a loud, uncontrolled hiccup, but said nothing. Smart woman.

He was halfway through the _A_ of _TRAP_ when Rust and Ledoux evidently decided to stop admiring their trussed and nailed-down prisoners like a no-touch museum exhibit. Ledoux bent down and hauled Tanya up, separating them, and Tanya screamed as the nail tore at her. Marty lumped up, his body so much stupid unresponsive meat, and Rust tapped him down again with a toe of his boot.

“My two favorite people,” Rust said. “Cops and fucking whores. A gift to me, a gift to you. What are your plans for ‘em?”

“What did Ginger tell you about me?”

Rust spat between his teeth. “Shit all. But he got that look on his face, got him the color of flour. I want to know what makes a man who’s seen everything act like he’s seen shit he ain’t never seen before. Ginger’s a pussy. I take what’s on offer. Took your blood, took whatever other shit you put in my drink and yeah, asshole, I know you did, fucking infinities expanding and contracting behind my eyes.” He sounded like himself, not like Crash, but Ledoux seemed to like that: he licked his lips like a lion in front of a fresh kill. “I saw things.”

“What did you see?” And now he sounded hungry for more than Rust.

Rust hesitated.

 _Come on,_ Marty thought. Panic licked through him, a thread of gasoline burning out. _Come on, baby. You know him. You know this shit. You remember every word that comes out of his mouth because you’re Rust fuckin’ Cohle and nobody does this better than you._

Rust tapped a cigarette out onto his palm, put it between his fingers, and lit up. He blew out a cloud of smoke.

“Yellow,” he said.

Another time, another place, Marty would have wanted to fuck him just for that, just for that indisputably right answer and the way it turned Ledoux’s face into glass and shining light. Smart had always turned him on. And there wasn’t a soul smarter than Rust on his best day. Marty knew that, he fucking knew it. He loved Rust for it.

“We worship,” Ledoux said. “All we do is service. Not to ourselves, not to coke, or heroin, or acid, not to money. We know there’s something outside all that. The universe is a disc and we serve the one who spins it and who sees us spin. Not for love of heaven or fear of hell, because there’s only now, Steve. Time is a flat circle. And what is outside that circle is the Yellow King and his court. Hastur and Yggdrasil, Nyarlhotep. The Nameless Things. The color. You don’t believe yet. All you’ve seen are glimpses. Let the blood pull back the curtain. You’ll see. Yellow—yellow is threaded through this place like gold in a river. It’s always been part of the blood of the county. At the center of every rock and the root of every family tree.”

“I’m from Texas,” Rust said. “This shit about local color—that doesn’t mean fuck-all to me. You say blood, you say gold, I understand what you’re getting at. I understand this.” He thrust the heel of his boot into Marty’s thigh. He was leaving Tanya alone entirely, something Marty hoped, even as pain flared up and down his leg, that Ledoux didn’t pick up on. “But whatever’s tradition here—I got no ties.”

“You’ll have ties. You’ll be part of something older than the sun. Older than rock.” Ledoux looked at him with shining eyes. “I was nothing, I was shit, but do you know what I am now?”

 _Nothing_ , Marty answered for Rust, with Rust’s contempt. _Shit._

“I’m the right hand. I’m his right hand.”

“The Yellow King’s?”

Ledoux smiled. “No one could be more than dust to the King. Tuttle’s.”

Marty shouted into the duct tape and Tanya looked up, the pain shaken out of her eyes by sheer bewilderment.

“Who the fuck’s Tuttle?”

“Boy, there have been Tuttles in Louisiana when it was still just French and Indians. The governor. The preacher. The whole family tree is yellow at the root, grown under the black star, watered with blood and come and tears, strengthened with madness. Errol’s one of them, and you’ll meet Errol, because he likes it, likes the women particularly. You won’t mind letting him get a taste of the girl as long as you’ve got the pig. I know what way your interest leans. You haven’t taken your foot off him since you came in. Never got your eyes on me.” Ledoux sounded almost fond of Rust for that, like the obsession he imagined pounding through Rust’s—Crash’s—Steve’s—blood was something he had felt many times before. “We’ll wait for Errol and we’ll split them open, plant the seeds in them, stretch their ribs and skulls with foreign bone. And give them a taste.” He opened up his hand and there was a little glassine packet inside it. “We’ll all stand in the court and feel the draft of the outer black air on our skin and we’ll offer up their skin like parchment for coming revelations.”

“Home-brewed?”

“You don’t think your friend Ginger’s the only one who’s particular, do you? Eddie Tuttle’s got me on commission.”

“And Errol. Errol—”

“Childress. He’s touched by the color. He’s lived with the King longer than anyone—his grandfather took him in the field and took him to the court himself. The honor of it, the blood, the ash. You can only wish you’d been there. But don’t stare at his scars if you can help it.”

“I wouldn’t,” Rust said. He took the glassine packet out of Ledoux’s hand. From Marty’s angle, it looked like a tea bag, shinier than usual, but harmless. Rust prodded at it. “You had good shit. Slow-acting, though.”

“This’ll be fast.”

“That’s what I was hoping you’d say,” Rust said, and he split it with his thumbnail, hard and fast, and blew it all in Ledoux’s face.

Ledoux wheeled back and Rust kicked at him, caught him squarely in the stomach and sent him falling backwards against the table. Tanya tried to scuttle back but her hand caught at the nail again and she moaned; Marty curled against her, pressed as much of his body as he could against the tight frightened muscles of her side.

Rust was relentless. He picked a toolbox off the ground and smashed it into Ledoux’s head, let it ring like a bell, and then tossed it aside as useless, like all he wanted to do was work with his hands, get in punches that would bloody his knuckles. He couldn’t stop. Marty saw how someone could be afraid of him. A dangerous man. But they were both dangerous men. He burned to do it, too, but couldn’t, and when Rust grunted, hard, and picked up the toolbox again, shook it out for a hammer and a set of nails, Marty slumped up and hobbled towards him as best he could. Crawled on knees and crooked elbows. He knocked his shoulder against the back of Rust’s knee and Rust spun around, white-faced.

 _Not worth it_ , Marty wanted to say, but he thought about Violet, about Jimmy. About Maisie and Audrey. Any child was just a way of seeing your own child, like his daughters were looking out of the bottom of every set of innocent eyes. And what had Ledoux done with innocence?

Reasons to stop Rust dried up in Marty’s mouth and he couldn’t have spoken them anyway.

Ledoux was slavering, higher than a fucking kite. No fight to him. It would be easy.

But Rust. Rust had gone under for killing a child-killer before, and nobody had had pity on him: they’d buried him deep.

Marty shook his head and Rust bent down and yanked the tape off Marty’s mouth with no gentleness at all—he was too far gone for that. “ _Why_?”

“I want you out,” Marty said. The adhesive was still on his lips and it gummed his words together. He had the feeling Rust could barely hear him. “Out, not deeper in.”

“There’s no _out_ ,” Rust said. He has a thousand-yard stare worse than any Marty had ever seen. Blood trickled off his hands and onto the ground. Ledoux continued to gabber senselessly in the background until Rust kicked him in the ribs again. So Rust would kill him, after all, and Marty couldn’t pretend he minded much. Tanya would back them up that they’d had no choice and maybe they didn’t. Maybe Rust was on a collision course with something inside himself, with the car that had hit his daughter, with this son-of-a-bitch and dead children, with Marty, and couldn’t stop this anymore than he could stop the sun from coming up.

Except Marty had made it his business, since he’d met Rust, to put himself between Rust and what Rust thought was inevitable, to tie himself down to the train-tracks in Rust’s head.

And it didn’t matter if they pinned it on Rust or not—killing people was no good for Rust, not if what Marty had seen of him up until now was any indication.

“Rust, don’t,” Marty said. “For once in your life would you just let things fucking be.”

Rust turned to look at him. His lips flexed, like he couldn’t decide whether to sneer or talk or drop to his knees and pray. He made some low sound, shifted the hammer in his hand, and then went over to the table and in one movement, pried the nail out of Tanya’s hand.

And for a second all Marty could hear was the buzzing of the flies. Then Tanya threw the hammer across the room, it crashed against a half-rusted shovel, and there was, briefly, silence. Ledoux said, “Carcosa,” and Marty, flatly, said, “Shut the fuck up.” His wrists and ankles hurt. He waited for Rust to come back and cut the ties on him. It occurred to him that he could have saved Rust at the cost of losing him, but when Rust did come back and get the tape off, he chafed at Marty’s hands and feet like he wanted to work the blood back into his skin.

“He’s not moving,” Tanya said of Ledoux.

“I don’t think he can,” Rust said, helping Marty brace himself against the table.

Tanya still kicked the nails out of his reach. She missed one; then picked it up off the ground and held it in her unwounded hand. After a second or two, she started to cry. The noise of her seemed like a reminder of something Marty could only barely remember. That there were other people in the world besides Rust, maybe. That she might have been owed some say on what happened to Ledoux. But he couldn’t bring himself to offer it to her, and whether that made him some Johnny-come-lately peace-freak or just a piece of shit, he didn’t know. Where the scales tipped—not on Ledoux, because he really didn’t give a shit, wished some blood vessel in the man’s brain would pop like a rubber band and take him off their hands—on mercy for Rust and justice for Tanya and the children. But he would choose Rust. He was starting to realize that. Every time the question came up, he was gonna choose Rust.

“Call 911,” Rust said to Marty without looking at him. “Have ‘em come in quiet. But I want her out of here before this Errol Childress shows up.”

“You don’t know half the shit storm this is gonna cause,” Marty said. He took his cell phone out.

“I saw him,” Tanya said. “Tuttle. All the fucking Tuttles. Eddie. Billy Lee.”

Marty raised his eyebrows. He couldn’t picture any of those vanilla-suited, limp-dicked sons of bitches going anywhere near this, but he couldn’t ask her if she was lying or not. She had her chin up and her eyes were like two pieces of flint. Whatever she knew, she wasn’t going to unlearn it before she gave her statement. And he owed her. Shit, in a better frame of mind, if he had his whole mind on the job instead of Rust fucking Cohle, he might have asked her himself to corroborate Ledoux, just so they had the extra ammunition.

Rust looked like he still didn’t know that the fuck they were talking about, but then again, Rust didn’t own a TV. Marty supposed he would acclimate Rust to the world, bit by bit, if they moved in together. The thought prickled up the hair on the back of his hands. Damn but Rust would be a pain in the ass to live with. Still. Even so.

Marty made the call and spelled out as much of it as he could without sounding like he’d lost his mind. Rust kept looking at what was left of the powder on his fingertips like he was going to go after it, and that made him nervous, too, made him hurry up. Ledoux’s eyes rolled back white and he quieted. Marty closed the phone, leaned against the table, and watched the man’s chest move. It was always the people you didn’t want alive who kept on living. In the absence of Rust, or in the absence of what he felt for Rust, he didn’t know what he would have done.

 _So there you go, asshole_ , he thought. _Time’s not flat at all._

He reached for Rust’s hand and Rust let him take it. Marty slid his thumb up and took Rust’s pulse against it, inaccurately but devotedly. So far as he could tell, both their hearts were still beating.


	15. Chapter 15

The bottom half of Errol Childress’s face was covered in scars from burns he’d gotten as a child. They had stretched with time.

Maisie started having nightmares when it was on the news. She didn’t want the Spaghetti Man to get her.

“How do kids hear about this shit?” Marty asked Maggie as he hung onto the phone cord.

Maggie made some dismissive sound. “Once something’s in the world, Marty, nobody comes along to take it out again.”

(But he could have. Or he could have let Rust.)

Childress talked a lot about his sister. Marty interviewed her. She showed him corners of her house and things Errol had given as keepsakes. Then she lifted the hem of her dress and showed him what else he had given her. Spaghetti, Marty thought. The spaghetti woman. He took plastic evidence bags of tufts of hair and racks of bone out to the car. He took photographs of her scars. He threw up against the front wheel-well.

He wanted to call Rust but Rust wasn’t taking phone calls yet.

He called Tanya, who listened to his self-justifications for three minutes before she said, “I can get things done without you,” and hung up on him.

She was in the news a lot. Just like the Tuttles.

*

“You know your career’s over,” Steve said to him. He was half-drunk and listing against the bar like a ship taking on more and more water. There’d been a strangeness to him since everything had happened: a look on his face that Marty couldn’t decipher. “Not your job, you’ll always have your job, but—you’re gonna be the fucking hero nobody trusts. On top of all the rumors you’re fucking Cohle.”

“I am,” Marty said, because he’d thought about it and couldn’t remember why he’d given a shit what Steve or anybody but Rust, Maggie, and the girls thought of him. “Or I was. Hard to tell, these days.”

“Shit.” Steve squeaked a thumb along the edge of his glass.

“And I know they’ll put me out to pasture. It’s fine. As long as they put Rust out, too. I’ve seen enough shit in the last few days to last me a lifetime, Steve. I don’t want any more of it. I’ll hang up a shingle somewhere else and handle insurance fraud all day. Something clean.”

“Nothing’s clean.”

“What’s your problem, anyway?”

“Besides you being a faggot all of a sudden?”

He didn’t correct that—either part of that—because he couldn’t see the point. If it came to it, he could lay Steve Geraci into the ground before Steve could even get in a punch, and with men, or the kind of men Marty knew, that was what mattered. Word would get around Marty was queer but word would also get around that it didn’t make him weak.

Except Rust had made him weak, just like Maggie had, just like Lisa had, for a little while: but that was private weakness. A soft underbelly.

It sure as shit didn’t have anything to do with Steve.

“Besides that,” Marty said easily. “Rest assured I’m not after _your_ ass, Steve.”

“Pick something,” Steve said. “You didn’t tell me about any of it. You partnered up with Cohle. And you—you didn’t let me get any fucking cover for it.”

Marty pushed his beer bottle back an inch or so, made two overlapping circles of condensation on the bar. He said, carefully, “Did you need covering for something?”

“Fuck you, Marty,” Steve said. He stood up and lost his balance for just a second.

Now, Marty thought, take that second and make it two months, and that would be his life.

*

He kept sending Rust postcards and writing soppy messages on them that wouldn’t seem soppy but were meant that way: _All the infrastructure’s crumbling and I keep making you casseroles_ , said one of them. Or else he’d send Rust inspirational cards. He tracked down everything within ten miles that had a cat hanging from a branch. _Everything’s still where you left it._

He got drunk one night—not with Steve, with Quesada, who regarded Marty’s choice of Rust as eccentric-bordering-on-contemptible but didn’t give a shit about the whole thing otherwise—and ended up buying a postcard with the Gulf on it at some two-bit gas station. He sent it off to the rehab station bobbing along in the post like a message in a bottle. He didn’t remember what he wrote on it.

(He only came across it in a shoebox Rust kept, ten years later: _I love you, I’m proud of you, I wish you were here_.)

Mostly, he waited for Family Day. He didn’t know who Rust had killed or threatened to get him on the list of approved visitors despite their lack of shared blood or name, but he kept getting the brochures about it in the mail. It was the only sign he had that Rust was still alive. Although sometimes he drove by the center, picked out a lit window, and imagined.

When the time rolled around, Maggie guided him through making some kind of fancy cake with orange-peel in the icing to take with him. His hands shook measuring out the sugar.

Maggie brushed the hair out of her eyes. “Have you thought about what the girls are going to call him?”

“He hasn’t been around for them to call him anything.”

“When he gets _back_.”

“I don’t know. ‘Rust.’”

“Good,” she said. “Don’t do that ‘Uncle Rust’ thing, I hate that. If he were their uncle, you’d be pretty fucked-up, not just lovesick.”

“I’m not lovesick.”

“A hundred thousand cakes in the world, Marty, and you picked the hardest one.” She wiped her hand across her forehead. “If that falls in the oven, you’re doing the next one on your own. And we’re renegotiating on alimony.”

*

When Family Day rolled around, Marty came bearing the third try of the cake, a half-melted vanilla milkshake, and a lump in his throat that felt like a stone. He hadn’t seen Rust, except in old pictures on the news, in two months. And he’d never seen Rust fully sober, with no glittery residue lighting up his system like a pinball machine, with no monkey on his back crashing cymbals together in his ears. Rehab had been part of some complicated deal Rust and the state had negotiated for his early two-thirds pension, rehab and psychiatric care, and Rust had faced it all with such grim resignation that Marty still couldn’t tell if it was his idea or not.

The last thing Rust had said to him, in the car as Marty had dropped him off at intake, was, “I always thought if they finally fished me out, I’d work homicide. And now I just want to rest. Know I’m whole when I close my eyes. Stop thinking about the things we’ve seen and just think about y—something else.”

There was the off-chance a dead-to-rights sober Rust would have the good sense not to want him.

But Rust was there when Marty arrived, sitting at some scratched blond-wood table, building a house of cards and only using the black suits.

Marty didn’t understand how everything in the room didn’t pull towards him, iron filings towards a magnet. That only he saw Rust like that was something he could never figure on.

“I guess I finally figured out all this Tuttle shit,” was how Rust greeted him. “Had to, the way they run it twenty-four-seven. They always light you from behind, shoot you from below, make you look heroic.” He divested Marty of the milkshake. “I tell people I’m sleeping with you and they like that even better than me being in the pictures, too.”

“I think you look good. It’s just the jacket makes you seem like a bad element.”

“You like the jacket,” Rust said easily.

“Yeah,” Marty said. “I like about all of you.”

After that, things got easier. Marty explained the cake in some detail, cut slices of it, and basked in Rust’s praise, which in typical Rust style meant he compared it to some poem Marty had never read and then said he liked the frosting. It all gave him a chance to look over Rust, which he didn’t mind. Sober, dried-out, Rust looked exhausted but not jittery, and he’d gained a little flesh to his bones. His hair hadn’t been cut lately and it gave him a shaggy, unkempt look that Marty pondered a little and then decided was a turn-on. Mostly what was different was the smile that would float unmoored across his face every so often during the conversation. Not that Marty had never seen him smile before. Just that he’d never seen it look that peaceful or that easy.

But it drifted off again as Rust steered them back to the case. “When are the trials gonna be?”

“You know how slow these things go when they’re this big,” Marty said. “My guess is we won’t see anything on the Tuttles for a year or more. We might squeeze Ledoux and Childress in before the Fourth of July. But it’s all tied up for right now.”

Rust scraped a bit of frosting off his fork and ate it off his thumb. “Ginger?”

“Tried to roll on Ledoux, which of course did jack-shit for him, since we already had Ledoux. He’ll get sentenced before New Year’s. Or Valentine’s Day, anyway.” Which was appropriate, since Marty had been the one to insist Ginger’s testimony would be meaningless, and had argued everyone into agreeing with him, and had done it largely for Rust’s sake, that he wouldn’t live under the shadow of Ginger getting out in ten years or less. A life sentence would give whatever bloody handprints Rust thought Ginger had left on his skin time to fade.

“Anyway,” Marty said, “it’ll all go down. They turned on each other like rats in a trap, and anyway, there’s you and me and Tanya, or me and Tanya, if they decide you’re too much trouble as a witness.”

“They will.”

“Maybe,” Marty said noncommittally, although he knew Rust was right. He’d spent some time fighting that, too, but there were fights a man could win and fights he couldn’t.

Like the fight to wrestle some kind of statement out of Steve. He didn’t live in the Garden of Eden: there were some weeds that would never be pulled.

“Anyway,” he said again, “it’ll go down. Right and tight.”

“Right and tight,” Rust murmured. “I feel like the billiard balls after someone breaks. Shit, I need a cigarette. They won’t let us have anything here.” He chewed fixedly on the straw of his milkshake, his eyes not on Marty but out the window. “I think I’ll be out in a month.”

“Yeah?”

“Find a place to stay.”

“Well,” Marty said. “You could, you know. You could stay with me. You’ve been staying with me anyway.”

Outside, where Rust was looking, birds were flocking in the tops of the trees. They were little darts of black bobbing in and out of the green. Not for the first time, he wished he knew what Rust was thinking, but what they had was no bridge to understanding, not necessarily: what he did was grope his way to Rust by feeling alone. Like Rust was a new limb he’d grown. They had not gone about the process of coming to each other in a natural way. He tried to imagine taking Rust on a date and his mouth twisted irresistibly upwards.

“I had the idea,” he said carefully, “that maybe after what happened—what didn’t happen—” What he hadn’t let happen. “—that you might not want to. And if so, I got to tell you, Rust, that’s some pretty backasswards thinking.”

“Is it.”

“It is,” Marty said, feeling a sudden flush of confidence. “Just because things didn’t work out exactly how we maybe would have wanted them to doesn’t mean they didn’t work out smooth. And I don’t know who the fuck I’m going to live with if I can’t live with you, Rust. I spent too long thinking I could just about throw the day away if I didn’t see you. And you’ve got to miss me, asshole. Nobody else ever feeds you, as far as I can tell.”

“I thought I’d get to where I’d feel her,” Rust said. “Sophia.”

Not what Marty had been hoping for. He leaned forward.

Rust’s eyes looked like somebody had drawn a veil across them and it was so unfamiliar that it actually took Marty a moment to realize Rust was trying to stop himself from crying. He found Rust’s hand and squeezed it and Rust stared even harder out the window. The birds exploded against the washed-out sky.

“I thought if I could hold it in my hand—take away the life that would have taken away hers, no second thought to it—I thought I’d come to some kind of peace. But I didn’t.”

“I’m sorry,” Marty said softly.

“But I do with you,” Rust said. He met Marty’s eyes almost warily and blinked: tears fell. “It’s like the two of you—I couldn’t feel it with Claire, not after, but before—like we were all—I don’t have the definitions for it.”

He had to be bowled over by that, considering some of the things he’d heard Rust define.

Rust was running one finger down each of Marty’s, tracing him.

“I still have that sketch you did,” Marty said, for lack of something better to say. He knew he’d brought it up before, but it felt different, saying it this time: felt more like a promise. “Never could get rid of it, even when I was pissed at you.”

“I think I could do a better one now.”

“I’m fond enough of the first.”

Rust was still memorizing him, like another month in those butter-yellow walls, away from Marty, would drive all recollection of flesh from him unless he was very, very careful. “You’re a peacock, Marty. When I get out of here, I’ll lay down any kind of bet you’ll let me draw you as often as I want.” He sounded like he would want it to be pretty often. He looked, for a second, like he was going to raise Marty’s hand to his mouth and kiss it, but instead he just dipped his thumb between two of Marty’s knuckles and held it there, like an answer, as weighty as anything Marty had ever carried. And he smiled.

One of the birds landed and started to walk along the windowsill.

Neither of them paid it much attention.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And... that's all she wrote. Thank you so much to all of you for all your support and thoughtful, wonderful comments. You've been an amazing set of readers and this is an amazing fandom, and one I feel so lucky to have contributed to. I hope you enjoyed it.


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